The Fortnightly Rant for Friday, November 18, 2011, from The New Hampshire Gazette, Volume 256, No. 4, posted online Monday, December 12, 2011.
In less than a week most Americans — assuming they have roofs over their heads, paid-up utility bills, and the price of a Butterball® — will re-enact a legendary encounter between British colonists and the indigenous people whom they would later displace. And why not? That shared meal is certainly more pleasant to recall than a lot of their later encounters.
Mayflower descendants whose enjoyment of the day may be tarnished by guilt can easily, if only partially, assuage it at the Foxwoods® Resort Casino, conveniently located just seven miles north of the hilltop where hundreds of Pequots were massacred fifteen years after the first Thanksgiving.
The survivors of those who were killed there can never be recompensed adequately — certainly not with a license to run a gambling hall. They could console themselves with the notion that they, and the children of their former oppressors, are now in the same sinking boat. But that would be a cheap triumph — just as dropping a week’s pay into the slots would be cheap expiation.
Both groups would be better served by ignoring whatever slight differences might remain nearly four hundred years after those first encounters. As fellow humans, the offspring of the native peoples and the colonists alike are being subjected to a new form of colonization. All we humans are now chattel to the newest species of predator on the planet: legal fictions called corporations.
Colonization by Corporation
In this, the only world we have, we mere humans, being both mortal and finite, are at an enormous disadvantage. Corporations, though, appear to have no natural limits as to size. And, if they can engineer enough taxpayer bailouts, they may be immortal as well.
It is no consolation that corporations are an invention of humans — so were land mines, nerve gas, and H-bombs. If we could ever accurately calculate the proportion of human ideas that turn out to be terrible, we might be tempted to outlaw invention.
Neither does it come as any comfort that corporations are run by humans — Norway was nominally run by a human named Vidkun Quisling. His death before a firing squad, to the extent that it is remembered, remains unlamented.
Corporations are required by their charters to maximize shareholder value. In effect, this means they are obliged to behave in a psychopathic manner; if a company can make a killing in the first quarter of a fiscal year by ending the world in the last, that’s good business. Which is why so many of them are busily converting both the atmosphere and the oceans into poison.
The Enemy of My Enemy
No single corporation could colonize the Earth by itself. It seems, though, that they cannot resist the temptation to do it together.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce probably has a position paper somewhere claiming that competition is the very soul of the market. It has lies for every occasion.
Coca-Cola and Pepsi are perceived as rivals; but, if voters somehow euchred Congress into banning corporate sales of carbonated sugar-water, the truth would soon come out. They have more in common with each other than they do with their customers. When attacked, they circle the wagons and defend each other.
The interlocking interests of these immortal psychopathic beasts, as interpreted by the generously-compensated quislings who run them, are the force that ultimately drives the world’s public policies — right into the ground.
Reasons to be Cheerful
Even so, there are reasons to be not just thankful, but cheerful.
The ancient Romans believed that “whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.” Those gods must be on the side of the humans, because the party most in thrall to the corporations has clearly lost its collective mind.
CNN’s Monica Crowley recently quizzed Republican Party Chairman Reince Priebus on polling numbers showing that 69 percent of the public believe that the policies of the GOP in Congress favor the rich. Priebus claimed that “it’s not true…the party doesn’t favor the rich.” Anyone who believes that — or expects anyone else to believe it — is certifiably insane.
Michele Bachmann, formerly a front-runner for her party’s Presidential nomination, suggested on Sunday that the U.S. should ditch its un-American programs like Medicare and Medicaid, and emulate China instead.
Rick Perry briefly followed Bachmann as the party’s not-Romney darling. His star quickly sank thanks to his bipolar performance: wooden in debates, but suspiciously liquid while speaking before a family-values audience. His poll ratings, when he suffered near-fatal brain freeze in a debate on November 9th, dropped from high to mid-single digits. Incredibly, not one of the liberal media’s character assassins thought to bring up the famous 3:00 a.m. phone call which Hillary Clinton would have been unprepared to answer.
Meanwhile Herman Cain, the current non-Romney, has introduced a new gambit to the old game: the Charlton Heston card. “I prayed and prayed and prayed,” he said, describing his decision to run for President. “And when I finally realized that it was God saying that this is what I needed to do, I was like Moses: ‘You’ve got the wrong man, Lord. Are you sure?’”
Whoa — stop the presses — this just in: Cain’s numbers are dropping, and Newt Gingrich is the new non-Romney. Turns out the Republicans believe in recycling after all.
Ooops — spoke too soon. Gingrich said during a recent debate that he “earned a $300,000 fee to advise Freddie Mac as a ‘historian’ who warned that the mortgage company’s business model was ‘insane.’ ” Bloomberg reports he was actually “asked to build bridges to Republican lawmakers and develop an argument on behalf of the company’s public-private structure that would resonate with conservatives seeking to dismantle it.”
Clearly the Republicans desperately need help. Here’s a free ad.
“Wanted: Credible Presidential Candidate. Contact Republican National Committee. No Romneys need apply.”