Saturday, July 25, 2009

I've always suspected...

one of the most dangerous words that manifests in our matrix as a threat to our very way of life within that matrix (or as we are now beginning to refer to it in past tense, "life as we knew it") is the word profit. Here, in this four minute commentary, Bill Maher shares a couple of examples why:

"The problem with president O'Bama's health care plan isn't socialism, it's capitalism. When did the profit motive become the only reason to do anything? When did that become the new patriotism? Ask not what you can do for your country, ask what's in it for Blue Cross Blue Shield. " (B. Maher)


(A 'tip of the hat' to 'xandtrek' for this one.)

In my senior high school English lit class, I discovered John Steinbeck. I still remember how. I was searching for the shortest, quickest read I could possibly find from our instructor's required reading list of novels. In a deserted library row of overstocked, under-read
shelves of fiction, I discovered a lone copy of Steinbeck's Cannery Row. I never expected to enjoy it. But I fell in love with its characters of societal misfits and the message conveyed through them which has affected me ever since in ways I'm sure I can't imagine or even know.

As described in an anonymously written paper entitled The "Failure" As Hero in Cannery Row, "where both human freedom and human virtue are obsolete, the result is itself an absurdity."

I think, as the Maher video points out, that is the world we have inherited. Absurdity is the world in which we are living. A world where money and its greedy pursuit thereof is most often the motivation driving the economy and nation toward an increasingly more dangerous future. A world that, through our own indifference or impotent reaction to where we are being led,
seemingly embraces its own absurd demise.

It's a world we richly deserve. A world we just may get? Maybe for Christmas!

8 comments:

a ball of Light said...

while playing timelines trivia last nite, i saw an interpretation i find linked to this thing labeled profit. it was about a thing labeled private property and how it arose in the brain's evolution alongside a thing labeled patriarchy and a thing labeled god. personally, i have never understood the fascination with, and utter devotion to any, and usually all, of these labels. i mean i get the concepts and the rationale and the integral-to-society nature of many words worth of explicaton, but i don't KNOW that to which the labels refer. i KNOW to what the label love and the label harmony refer.

I salute the light within your eyes where the whole Universe dwells. For when you are at that center within you and I am that place within me, we shall be one." - Chief Crazy Horse, Oglala Sioux

Namaste

Dada said...

abol: What beautiful words with which you chose to close your comment. But how can we be sure they are not the words of some 19th Century idealistic Romantic?

I mean, isn't it extremely questionable such prose could even be imagined let alone expressed by some uncivilized savage with a name like Crazy Horse?

Well, I can only say, "Thank God we prevailed over such savage beasts. I mean, look at all we enjoy as a result of white man civilization."

a ball of Light said...

silly me thinking a thing like that could come down unscathed by spin. why i can remember like it was just October i heard a man say he would bring change. all i've seen indicates to me the chronicling that has come down thru such a long time past neglected to include the word superficial ...

Dada said...

amen, bro! But to cynics such as us, at least we need suffer no disillusionment -- we've gotten about all the *real change* we were promised. (Thankfully!)

Imagine if things really had changed? What the hell would I have to blog about? What would I do with all my new found time?

(Oh wait, I may have been presumptive -- tossing you in the cynics bin as I have, when I suspect you subscribe to a higher order.)

a ball of Light said...

real change could have forced you to blog about how damn happy everyone is 'pretending' to be and you would have to forego any but FAUX tv in order to inject more than a modicum of disgust into your posts.

iam honored you have included me in the cyclics bin... one of my greatest ambitions is to be an harmonic fifth standing wave, which is a somewhat higher order... although i get it by atom feed rather than by subscription

a ball of Light said...

i just wanted to say thanks Dada, for tossing me in the cynics bin it was the impetus for getting that harmonic fifth standing wave thingy figured out.

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