(09-18-2018, 10:13 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:(09-18-2018, 07:52 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:Yes, I'm an extremist by cozy blue standards. If one were dirt poor and living in a tent without running water or electricity or plumbing and scrounging for money and food like they're doing in most blue cities these days, one might begin to think or believe that its time to start tearing it down right now within blue America.(09-18-2018, 06:50 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: Moderate progressive may well be the new majority within the Democratic party, a few blue states and most blue/green districts. You keep thinking & speaking as if we live in a democracy when we actually live in a republic. Like I said, I could live without California. I assume that Californians would be given a choice of whether to stay American and remain with America or identify as a Californian and accept whatever system that a group of blues decide is best for all people who remain in California. I don't care if California goes back to building roads like our ancestors did back in good old days.
Well, you are the extremist. For most people, the system as it is isn't bad enough to tear it down. The Spiral of Violence is not escalating domestically. The see saw has been switching back and forth regularly, so folks are used to living under really bad presidents from their perspective. This is to be resolved by a political brouhaha, rather than old style Industrial Age violence.
The demographics and the issues will settle it, eventually. Every year, the Red Boomers get older and the green issues become easier to see. We just have to suffer through the red nonsense before the juggernaught eventually develops
It could take a while. Cultures are incredibly stubborn.
Strawman.
I recognize that opportunity is grossly unequal in America, and most people must learn to make the best out of bad situations, like a job that one hates and offers few means of advancement within the organization. Millions of people hate the economic reality that they face.
Some people do that well. It is far harder than having advantages, but even having advantages implies that one knows how to use those. Maybe someone despises the community in which he lives and is unwilling to recognize the opportunity to get ahead where he is. Maybe one is so attached to the community in which he lives that he is unwilling to take any but the most perfect promotion to leave it. So one hates his job in fast-food work in some dreary hick town and refuses to commit himself to taking a managerial job in the business because he might get a job as an actuary in Chicago -- and the actuary job never materializes. Or one can't imagine leaving the rural utopia for a well-paying job as an actuary in Chicago. For that matter, many people who love the paradise climate and the scenery of the San Francisco Bay Area would never leave it for living less expensively in a place where the scenery is non-existent (northern rural Illinois) and the climate is an alternation between tropical heat in the summer and a Russian winter.
Or you decide between seeing the world or buying some vending machines. If you trade off a honeymoon in Paris for one in Pittsburgh. you might make so much money off the vending machines that you can take a yearly junket to just about anywhere you want. On the other hand, the vending machines might be decrepit boxes selling unattractive stuff for a low profit margin that maintenance costs devour, so you are out the money.
It is easy to believe that the people who rule America want most people to fail, to rely upon entertainment as a salve for jobs far below their spirits, and to recognize that Big Business will squash practically any small business that starts to show a profit that Big Business will make. The American tax structure favors giant, vertically-integrated firms instead of small businesses that have been more effective at creating jobs and family incomes. The business that Americans least admire (aside from landlords) is cable TV, which offers scores of channels that few people watch.
In the 3T, the system offered 'shopping' as entertainment and self-expression. Nobody believes that any more. Not one enclosed shopping mall has been built since 2006, and many of them have been demolished.
I know that the ideal person in Trump's America is someone who sports that over-broad "Happy to serve you!" smile while struggling to hold onto a job of mind-numbing, soul-crushing routine and is happy to share a decrepit trailer with several other working-poor people in a society that recognizes material indulgence as proof of one's worth as a human being. Most people either cannot develop well-honed skills or have the wrong skills to match what is needed at the time (and those needs can evaporate). So maybe we can have high-enough tariffs to bring back those glorious sweat-shops in which people are machines again as on the assembly line in which the Tramp (Charlie Chaplin) somehow does not fit because he is not a machine (Modern Times, 1936 -- you really ought to see it!)
Life is absurd, and Donald Trump is absurd as any political leader can be, unless the leader is "Adenoid Hynkel" (Charlie Chaplin again in The Great Dictator, and you also ought to see it. Chaplin plays a double role as a Jewish victim of "Der Phooey"... and I can imagine a remake in which some great comic figure plays both Donald Trump and some devout Muslim (Turkish? Albanian? Bosniak?) who somehow turns the tables on "Deplorable Trash" in "Absurdistan".
(OK, Vaclav Havel mocked Communist Czechoslovakia as "Absurdistan", so I admit that I can't claim great literary creativity).
Do see The Great Dictator, which has become unusually and freakishly relevant to America since the election of D as in deplorable, J as in Judas, and T as in tyrant.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.