My thought bubble for the hapless noble behind Louis XVI at the guillotine:
"Great, you had to go screw up a perfectly good things for the rest of us. I fucking hope you come back as a cockroach"
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Mille m...
5 years ago
11 comments:
Great... so we're turning French now... Sacré bleu!!!
Qu'ils mangent de la brioche
No
The United States is a massive country, and is very regionalized. Folks from California and, say, Alabama are very different. As different as the British are to the French. There is no unity in that regard. The distance and social disconnect between regions is so large, you might as well be on Mars. This happened to me. I grew up in the American West, and found myself in the American South later in life. My God, I didn't even feel like I still WAS in the United States. Certainly not the America I grew up in.
Protests won't work here, because you won't have enough support from other social classes and groups. It doesn't help when those other social classes and groups don't particularly like each other, and lot of them don't really consider themselves truly American. They're African-American, Latino, Italian-American, Gay & Lesbian, and so on. And realize the 1960's in this country harbored a lot of social unrest, and protests were more prevalent. But then the 1980's happened and everyone here got soft on cocaine and pyramid schemes. The counter-culture lost once already.
Voting doesn't work because there are too few legit options and most people vote their affiliation, anyway. The Republicans could nominate an actual elephant as their candidate and you will still have card-carrying Republicans voting for it. Same with the Democrats and a donkey. There are third parties, but voting for them is akin to spitting in the wind. It won't amount to much, except make you feel better about yourself should you possess any sort of principle. Which most Americans do not, or McDonald's wouldn't be turning a huge profit during this financial crisis.
So you can protest all you want. Won't work. Can't do it here. You'll get laughed at, so you quit. You go home. Dejected.
A result of that, once you realize there isn't much you can do when the masses, the ones who not only fail to see the subtext but fail to even make an attempt to find it, are the majority.
For the minority, it simply makes them jaded and cynical. And once you become cynical, then who cares if the world burns, right?
It's an unfortunate cycle.
It's simple.
America is a brain-washed bunch of spoiled, righteously self-entitled, complacent bastards. We're too dumb to realize we're being distracted away from what's REALLY going on... 65" LCD 1080p TVs, iPods, and in-dash navigation.
As long as we have our latest-and-greatest toys, no need to take action. That's the great U.S. of A. I know. A bunch of cowardly, obese, complacent sheep. (Don't worry... I've found myself in the flock more than I'd like.)
I hope one day, we start to fathom our currency and realize what a Parker Brothers Monopoly-gone-wrong joke it really is right now. When this realization becomes status quo, we're either up for the challenge or completely and utterly fucked.
Do or Die.
Fuck man, I am barely hanging on by a shoestring and I have to work to pay my rent and bills. I don't know who the fuck you are that you can afford to loaf off and protest shit all day, but God bless you and hold my place on the picket line, please, because my daddy doesn't cover my credit card payments.
Because it is exactly what is expected.
Poor people riot and big thugs with guns and uniforms come to the rescue yet again. Sound familiar?
It's an age old story that's been played out a thousand times in places all over the world. Hell it's such a guaranteed formula to keep the wealthy in power that the last administration even had troops and concrete prison cells set aside for the party.
Well guess what. This time it didn't work. Maybe just maybe this time something really was different.
Maybe we are starting to realize that ignoring a bully takes away his power. Maybe Americans where spoon fed just enough Karl Marx to realize just how controlled and manipulated they really are.
In places that have created larger than life heroes and scenarios people in power often find the need to create larger than life villains to substantiate there rule.
We don't play that game anymore.
Because we're all too in debt and busy working every day. We've so bought in to the "work = money = cool stuff = good life" mantra that we can't afford to miss work or risk losing our jobs to go protest. We've been enslaved.But instead of chains of steal, we are chained by debt.
Only a matter of time.
Just wait until more of the general population cannot afford their stupid shit. Then they will need to do something if they want to keep up that lifestyle.
It is a shame that more protests aren't actually reported. It's hard to do any major collaboration when everything you do is put behind stupid shit about celebrity divorces, who's going to guest star on some butt fucked retarded show, or never even mentioned anywhere.
Not all of us are half-inbred rednecks who are afraid of the government. It's just that the majority happen to be.
In the USA, for the median wage, if you are careful and just a little bit lucky, you can: eat better than Napoleon; know more about the world than Newton; and be more travelled than Magellan. This is fantastic. We all should earn more than we need.
And it's not actually true that rich people keep the millions to themselves. Either they spend it, benefiting some tradesperson somewhere, or they invest it, which under normal circumstances makes the world more productive. They do derive the first benefits, but due to the money multiplier effect, quite a lot of it does get distributed.
The real problem is when rich people are organized to protect their interests and regular-to-poor people aren't. That is what is slowly tilting the playing field, where if you do not have the good fortune to be in the class of millionaires, you kid's school is defunded, your brother is in jail for selling a harmless plant, you lose your employability when an entire industry gets transferred to another country, you try to make up the difference with usurious credit cards, and basically, you are no longer in control of your own life.
I actually lay a lot of the blame on us (the regular to poor people) for basically falling asleep since about 1977, and being duped by the right-wing movements of the 1980s and the sybaritic consumerism of the 90s and 00s.
Wow. I assume there are multiple anons here.
Some random thoughts:
1) The US is a massive country, California to Alabama is equivalent to Spain to Ukraine. It's an indication of the political and cultural integration that the two states aren't more different.
2) Tyler Cowan has this extraordinary quote from Agatha Christie, and I paraphrase: "I don't I'd be so rich to own an automobile, nor so poor so not as to afford a servant." The median American certainly enjoys creature comforts not available to Napoleon; on the other hand Napoleon enjoys things most us cannot afford (large country estate etc). So while there is no dispute that the median American today is better than the median French during the height of Napoleonic empire, saying that the median American is better off than the top 5th percentile French during that time is a much more difficult claim to ascertain.
3) That having said, the problem is not median wage per se, but its regression. In real terms, median wage has declined somewhat during the past 20 years, and it's very discouraging to run that hard just to stay in place.
4) It is only human nature to identify causes with a human face. The cost of this crisis is already several trillion, I think it is necessary, but that much money is bound to have wastes and corruption. And AIG is so greedy and dumb (never a good combination) that they are now the face of everything that's wrong with our screwed-up system. Chopping off Louis XVI's head does not directly address the pitfalls of feudalism but it does appeal to our sense of vigilantism.
Mostly true. And we also have to move beyond just demonizing the rich to demonizing the idea of being rich. Most people who aren’t rich are trying to get rich and are just as guilty of feeding this attitude that rich people are the most important.
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