Rick Perry as a Metaphor for a Late Great Planet or Why I am a Socialist

Texas Governor Rick Perry, a man of very little brain and expansive ego was a viable presidential candidate and will most likely try again in the next presidential cycle which, incredibly, has already begun. This news should spark more than a little consternation among rational beings. Perry has covered his simplicity and troubling lack of knowledge with a polished veneer and Texas swagger that makes him appear presentable in the sham we still refer to as our representative democracy. He does indeed have the necessary qualifications for the nation’s highest office; he is passably good looking. He has great hair. He speaks in short sentences without too many big words. And his feeble comprehension of difficult issues and ideas translates into a glib vernacular that resonates with many Americans who detest eggheads and complete sentences. Rick sadly is no better and no worse than the cascade of dumb and dumber contenders in recent decades who believed that they were qualified successors to Lincoln, FDR, and George McGovern who might very well have been one of our greatest presidents had he been elected. One can only sadly speculate how different America would be today had McGovern’s decency, courage, and intellect left its legacy instead of four more years of Nixon paranoia and corruption.
   

 As we have grown accustomed to mediocrity dominating the national stage, barely literate politicians increasingly dominate our crippled political discourse. Policy now originates from sequestered oligarchs representing monied interests. Their self-serving policies germinated behind closed doors are articulated to taxpayers by elected shills speaking a unique language of obfuscation glazed with incoherent drivel and fabrication.  Moreover, the elected elite who putatively represent the people are chosen from an incestuous and dangerously shallow gene pool culled from two political parties which are virtually indistinguishable from each other.

 This system is frequently described by the entitled plutocrats benefitting most from it as the greatest democracy ever conceived by mankind and blessed eternally by an approving and loving god. The founding fathers are often invoked during these perfunctory rhapsodies to the American experiment in hedonistic capitalism lending bedrock validity to our mythic and delusional greatness. The founding fathers, also plutocrats, drafted the Constitution and Bill of Rights which did little for women, blacks, Native Americans and poor whites, but it did succeed in giving the privileged additional privilege. The warts are rarely mentioned in our high school history classes
  

 A national dialog about our many problems, some of which impinge on the very survival of our species, barely exists.  Perhaps it never did, but we have managed to perch ourselves on the edge of a precipice where there is no longer any room or time for magical thinking or pretending that the imminent social and ecological collapse looming over us can be ignored. Like Red Sox and Yankee fans, Republicans and Democrats barely speak to one another and are tethered to a status quo that views the pursuit of profit and property as a divinely ordained imperative.  Inexplicably, they do manage to amiably cavort together on the greens for a rousing game of golf without incident or rancor. Apparently, wrapping their prehensile digits tightly around a long shaft while attempting to knock little white balls into tiny holes provides a comforting and sublimating distraction from the daily dysfunction of Congress and the stress of deceiving the American people.
  

Even ordinary citizens barely talk to each other.  And when we do there are rules limiting content. Topics that might cause disagreement or induce thoughtful exchange are off limits The more inane and innocuous the topic the more frequently and intensely it is bantered with zero distress and investment. Consequently, even casual talk has been diminished to Lilliputian dimensions. The seasonal cycles of our culture now seem to whorl around the next big game. 

 Increasingly, we live solitary lives in which we don’t even bother to know our neighbors.  Any lingering vestiges of talk, dialog, chat etc. can only be conducted using a linguistic currency that is stunted, hackneyed, and removed of all nuance. Americans have grown uncomfortable with any communication not presented in monosyllabic sound bytes teeming with familiar coded imagery . The written and spoken word has been displaced as the primary media of intellectual exchange by the ubiquitous visual media talking at us via television, the internet, Twitter, and computer games. One wonders whether a nation can achieve greatness when grown men get excited about playing video games and fantasy baseball. How can a nation problem solve that doesn’t read and avoids the quiet solitude essential for reflective contemplation.   Thoreau wrote that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” He would no doubt be appalled by our enchantment with technologies that not only prevent us from exiting childhood, but have seduced us into abdicating our independence.  My father grew up during the depression and life was about survival, self-reliance, and helping others in need. He would view contemporary American culture as frivolous, self-indulgent, and altogether contemptible.  Today we call AAA to change a flat tire. 

 We have become a nation of milquetoasts; a fatuous, mean-spirited, and superstitious country.    We have come to believe exactly what we have been told for decades: American exceptionalism entitles us to kill whomever we wish and that we have the right to be perpetually entertained. The impacts on our culture, schools, and politics are toxic and diminish our human potential to inert and voyeuristic passivity. We are a nation of magical thinkers embracing delusional faith-based ideologies while rejecting science and reason. All substance must be diminished to keep us attentive. Dumbing down information doesn’t enhance comprehension it merely beguiles us into a ravenous need for simplistically packaged content. Texting is the latest affront to a vibrant intellectual life. Parents have the effrontery and bad manners to text their children in my classroom. Their ignorance and narcissism merely enables their tediously entitled children.

  Science requires big words and big ideas. How can we teach children or Rick Perry about genetic engineering or climate change when the marketplace has subliminally mandated that only their latest gizmos, gadgets, and fatuous technologies are worth our time and money. And how can students embrace knowledge and scientific methodology when complexity is alien to their experience. Perusing People magazine while you wait to get your teeth cleaned does not fulfill our responsibilities to be informed citizens.

 The idiotocracy imposed by our corporate culture is hardly compatible with the ideals of Jeffersonian democracy.  In all of our institutions, church, state and private, the less is more meme has been integrated into our cultural DNA.  The propagation of simplicity as a virtue and the trivialization of the sanctity of all life have infected American society like an endogenous retrovirus. The sad results of this insidious process are clearly discerned in our embarrassing politics, moribund schools, escalating ecological degradation, metastatic militarism, and woeful inability to do anything for ourselves. The American creed has been devalued into a kind of my country, right or wrong boosterism.  American exceptionalism has become, and most likely always was, a passive and ghoulish death vigil. This bleak prognosis will be our legacy to future generations assuming that our planet is still habitable which becomes increasingly doubtful with passing year of inert apathy.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are exemplars of the destroyer culture that American policymakers have integrated into our collective ethos. War is marketed like toothpaste and presidents.  “Shock and Awe” seemed more like a video game than an unnecessary human tragedy in which innocent sentient beings were reduced to aerosols. Meaningless abstractions like patriotism and faith were ruthlessly unleashed by the media and craven politicians to marginalize opposition to the senseless slaughter. Dissent is un-American. Slogans reminding us to support the troops are endlessly repeated. Those who want to support our troops by bringing them home are again ostracized as traitors who are ungrateful for the courage and sacrifice of our troops, who were and remain kids from mostly poor and middle class backgrounds. The poor have always fought America’s wars and always will.  The mantra in our schools chanted over and over again that less is more has become just one more unchallenged truth. Unfortunately, less will always be less. And as we unabashedly teach to a badly flawed standardized testing regimen and lower our expectations for children they become more contentedly ignorant and vacuous. Complexity has become as un-American as Christ’s quaint notion that the peacemakers are blessed in the eyes of God. We want ideas that we can sip through a straw. No mastication involved.  Americans exercising their franchise in our sham democracy will be forced, as always, to choose between two corrupt mediocrities whose policies will be more compromise, capitulation, and death. 

 In our schools, classroom discussions critical of our actions in Afghanistan and Iraq were not only discouraged, but in many cases expressly forbidden. Teachers who failed heed admonitions not to encourage students to think for themselves about the carnage and endless tragedy of war were and are threatened with termination. I was one of those teachers who was told on a number of occasions to        ” keep the politics out of the classroom”.  And thanks to a provision in the ghastly NCLB law, military recruiters are empowered to come into our schools and seduce “targeted” kids with promises of job training, money for college, and gifts of bumper stickers ,balloons, refrigerator magnets and other assorted trinkets and baubles made in China all delivered in a carnival atmosphere. After all, these impressionable kids are going to be doing the important work of protecting our nation, our values, our right not to think. And killing the bad guys is fun, not much different from a video game; that is until you see your buddy with his face blown away, or a child murdered in the crossfire of a firefight. These kids are told that they are patriots taking the fight to the enemy rather than fighting the bad guys on Main St. USA. War is good if the politicos deem it so. Killing is good if you are killing the designated “evil doers”. Of course, you will never see the sons and daughters of the war cheerleaders fighting our dirty wars. That always will and always has been left to poor kids who have few options beyond the seductive messaging of the vendors of war.  Those same “evil doers” we exhort poor children to kill might be our allies or trading partners tomorrow but sacrificing young lives on both sides in the name of profit is always worth the price; or so we are continuously told by both parties in our flourishing democracy. Their deaths and murderous deeds will not have been in vain. Their lives will have had purpose and meaning. And we believe this bullshit because men like Bush, and Obama, and Gingrich, and Santorum, and Romney, all good men of faith, affirm the veracity of the official narrative which is endlessly repeated in the media, and our schools, and by the holy men from their pulpits, conveniently forgetting The Sermon on the Mount and that nuisance commandment against killing.

 And just when it seemed possible that our nation in perpetual war for decades might take a different course, Iraq redux is now being orchestrated against Iran by many of the same patriots who brought “Shock and Awe” conveniently into our living rooms as if the incineration of innocent people amounted to little more than the next generation of vile cyber-entertainment. The cheerleaders who stoked the jingoistic lunacy of American militarism against the battered remains of Iraq and Afghanistan are beating the drums of virtuous war to bring us yet another ghoulish decade of death and suffering and homicidal slaughter on the American taxpayer’s dime and vestigial conscience.

  In contemporary America, learning, debate, knowledge, understanding, and critical thinking have become debased and sanitized. Less is more and reductionism is good. This is the absurd essence of contemporary American culture and education. It is the fundamental ideology retooling our schools so that our children’s  brains will be adequately washed and  dried for the requisite acquiescence necessary to inhabit the brave, new and terrifying world to come.  It really is that simple.  American oligarchs do not want our schools to cultivate thoughtful, empathetic, critical thinkers and problem solvers. On the contrary, students with a conscience are difficult as are students who ask questions. The extinction of empirically trained, seekers of the truth continues. A culture that nourishes an ethical vision is certainly needed to save the planet, but is antithetical to the voracious greed that lubricates capitalism. The spiral of endless growth and profligate consumption promulgated by the so-called free market on a finite planet with an exponentially growing population is unsustainable and irrational; to pretend otherwise perpetuates the inevitability of a scenario that will result in the extinction of our species in the near term. Neither money nor power will protect the plutocrats from the same fate as the rest of us. 

So our current state of political discourse in America consists of the habitually disingenuous propagating mendacity and deception to credulous Americans believing whatever a screen tells them. Reality is defined by television and video imagery.  If it’s not on television then it doesn’t exist. Rick Perry is merely the most recent example of a candidate with presidential aspirations to be lauded and mythologized for his counterfeit persona and grade school intellect. Since this paragraph was written Slick Rick has dropped out of the race. His feeble intellect coupled with a gift for malapropisms and the debating skills of a petulant child put the embarrassing spectacle of his campaign to a much deserved end. Sadly, it is unlikely we have seen the last of Governor Perry. It is also unfortunate that the remaining candidates are also imbeciles without any capacity for achieving the escape velocity needed to objectively see the pathology of capitalism and the intractable problems it continues to create but is incapable of solving.
 

 Our political ecosystem has become increasingly less complex with each election cycle. The incestuous nature of a corrupt political process has resulted in candidates sounding more and more alike. The brilliant song and accompanying video “Testify” by Rage Against the Machine portrays Bush and Gore during the 2000 presidential election as political clones distanced only by slight rhetorical perturbations. Michael Moore described them succinctly as the “lesser of two lessers”.

 Obama ‘s speeches soar linguistically above the angry pieties of the Tea Party, or the soporific clichés of John Boehner, but the end result has been the same; no change, merely stasis. Another lost four years and lost opportunity. And as we argue about debt ceilings, and whether or not the rich should pay for their wars,  global restoration, economic and social justice, and nourishing a reverence and wonder for all life mankind continues its sad march to game over. Ozymandias would be amused.

 The banality of the Republican primaries is just another unfortunate and protracted distraction from the daunting task of saving the planet from imperious greed and blatant disregard for the kind of world our children will be forced to live in. Perry brings nothing to the process but fatuous ideas, hypocrisy as vast as the drought scorched west Texas plains, and the stench of death his inert, Koch brothers ’funded, lie machine will inevitably bring.  Sadly, it could very well be a world that will be unrecognizable to people alive today.  Perry, like Bush and so many of the new Republican Party don’t believe in science. So a President Perry or Bacchman or Palin will do nothing to alter the course of devastating climate change, mass extinctions, prolonged periods of drought etc. What we can expect are days of prayer, and faith based policies that continue to narrow the rapidly closing window of opportunity to mitigate a horrific future scenario.

  Perry believes in God and the deregulation of business and unfettered capitalism. You see free markets are just the fix we need. And unregulated, laissez-faire, capitalism will get Americans back to work, and grow the business as usual economy. Of course the suicidal human trajectory will inevitably crash. Rick Perry’s market-based theology makes a tragic mockery of Christianity.  In reality, he is a social-Darwinist who would rather point the finger of blame at the poor, unemployed, and homeless. Blessed are the rich because they create jobs. They have worked hard and been blessed by God with prosperity.  Screw the lazy pricks who don’t want to work. Homeless families should find their bootstraps. The policies of Rick Perry will be informed by this unpleasant deity.

It is remarkable just how quickly Americans forget stuff. Cultural ADD has reduced the average American attention span to that of an inbred puppy. Case in point, just a few months ago crude oil was spewing into the Gulf of Mexico and all those smart people at British Petroleum had no idea how to stop it. They knew how to extract it and sell it, but when the well blew they were helpless to staunch the wound. The result was weeks of failed attempts to stop the tens of millions of crude oil belching into a fragile and enormously fertile ecosystem. The reason for British Petroleum’s incomprehensible corporate incompetence was good old American greed. The anything for a buck dogma that is the mantra of big business encourages bad behavior such as cutting corners on safety and writing bogus risk assessment analyses.  In BP’s risk assessment of their deepwater drilling operations in the Gulf, they determined that the probability of a blowout was zero. In other words, what did happen at the Deepwater Horizon well, could not have happened.  Not surprisingly, the government agreed with BP.  This egregious lack of federal oversight is the result of an expired firewall separating the wreckless pathology of business which has been exempted from consequences of its own shameless profiteering at the expense of the public interest and global sustainability.

 This cancer of corporate skullduggery, unaccountability, and amorality is growing, and Rick Perry and his tribe want more deregulation. In other words, The plutocrat oligarchy want Americans to adopt a faith based economics that  wants more skullduggery and zero oversight as the optimal way to promote economic recovery.  So companies producing thneeds and gluppity-glup will be able to do so without worrying about torturous regulations and pesky federal regulators that do nothing but increase the cost of making an honest buck.

 So the idea of deregulation to the point of no regulation, espoused by Perry, Michelle Bacchman, and others along with the feeble obeisance of Obama’s brain trust continues to gain traction among a credulous public who doesn’t read and believes whatever the tube tells them to believe. Imagine the frightening absurdity of a reality defined by Fox News. Resistance against it will be too little too late, but who knows. And I certainly intend to go down swinging. I owe that much to my four daughters, just like all of us need to fight back for our children and grandchildren. Even Rick Perry has the very same moral responsibility to alter the course, but Rick is clueless. That is why he is running for president. And of course he has money which is essential to get a seat at the banquet. So I guess you can see why deregulation is such a great idea if you have the brain the size of an armadillo’s. Reason to Hope,  my ass Barack.

As mentioned, Rick doesn’t believe in science.  Evolution, forget about it. He didn’t come from any monkey. He is a child of the God he believes in. There is no evidence for the existence of this God, and frankly, even as a product of Rick’s delusional propensities,  Rick’s God seems like a pretty unpleasant character. Certainly not a deity I would choose to worship if I was given to that kind psychosis. Getting back to evolution, don’t bother pointing out that chimpanzees and humans share about 98% of the same genes. And the translocation on chromosomal 2, get real. Rick prefers his invented reality in which his creator will fix everything Rick and his tribe continues to fuck up with such hedonistic abandon. That is what makes Rick so dangerous. He truly believes in an omnipotent and omniscient creator who has given the true believers like Rick a license to pillage creation with impunity. He is sort of like the Onceler, only incapable of remorse.

   Rick Perry’s fatuous views on the established, growing, and increasingly ominous body of evidence supporting anthropogenic climate change are a dispiriting example that facts no longer matter in a culture that elevates image over truth. To be clear there is no doubt that that our rapidly warming planet is the biggest threat we face as a species. If you are unacquainted with the science, like “Slick Rick”, then get a quick tutorial by Googling a recent pentagon study that concluded that greenhouse warming poses a bigger threat to America than terrorism. But the “game changer” Rick Perry believes otherwise. “I think we’re seeing almost weekly, or even daily, scientists that (sic) are coming forward and questioning the original idea that manmade global warming is what is causing the climate to change.” The wise man has spoken, but who are these scientists who are “daily” coming forward to renounce the “theory “of global warming? Not even Rick knows the answer to that simple question because his assertions are not true. There is an overwhelming consensus among CLIMATE scientists that the window of opportunity to reduce carbon emissions is rapidly closing. As emissions continue to rise unabated, catastrophic changes to our planet’s ecology (our life support system) are inevitable. Perry eloquently summed up his simian views by stating that, “I don’t think from my perspective that I don’t want to be engaged in spending that much money on still a scientific theory that has not been proven and from my perspective is more and more being put into question.” Grammatically garbled gibberish from yet another Texas idiot and megalomaniac. Apparently, Rick is not aware that a theory is a powerful word in science. To designate something as a scientific theory like evolution, the existence of atoms, disease caused by pathogenic microbes, and, yes, climate altered by man’s activities, is to affirm it as being as close to an absolute truth as science permits.

   So Rick Perry is not being truthful. If Rick says things that are not true then Rick is a liar. Sadly, Rick is not reluctant to put his abysmal ignorance on display. Like a male peacock’s colorful mating plumage, Perry struts his cognitively challenged intellect to attract voters who frankly don’t know shit. But fear not, Rick Perry knows shit. Like Elmer Gantry, Rick could talk a Hoosier virgin out of her hot pink panties. Of course, as a Christian soldier Rick would never do such a thing. Perry’s professed faith will be used to bludgeon Biblical truths into the noggins of unbelievers like me. Christian politicians are inoculated from self-doubt by the unyielding dogma of their faith. Unfortunately saving the planet is not a Christian priority because of that Rapture thing. That imposing task will be left to heathens who just can’t buy into the god delusion.

 What I would like to know is why the press simply allows these shameless charlatans posing as public servants to spew whatever nonsense drifts into their vacuous reptilian brains without putting their cloven feet into the molten flames of a truth check. Shouldn’t every citizen be an empiricist and demand evidence from the buffoons who proclaim themselves as saviors of our dysfunctional political process? Do we simply put the fate of our imperiled planet into the hands of “Slick Rick” by credulously assuming that because he said it with earnest conviction on Fox to a shapely inquisitor of the Aryan sisterhood that it must be embedded in the bedrock of corporate and Biblical truth? 

For example, had I been present during Rick’s middle school discourse on global warming, I would have asked him to explain, in tiny bites and in fifty words or less, why all those naïve, self-serving, profiteering scientists at NOAA and the EPA,  and the IPCC are so concerned about rising levels of greenhouse gases.  I’d also ask him how those harmless gases are supposed to increase atmospheric temperatures as claimed by the ignoramus climatologists he loathes so much, even though their concerns are pure fantasy in Rick Perry’s science illiterate parallel universe. In other words, does Rick have a basic middle school understanding of the issue? Does he have a basic understanding of fundamental middle school science? Does he know the chemical symbol for gold (just curious)?  Since I have already conceded that Rick knows shit, I expect that his responses would not disappoint and echo my contention.