The story of the Titanic is legendary. An infamous ship that sank a hundred years ago but the telling of its sudden demise is still as fresh as if it happened yesterday. Hollywood turned the story of the Titanic into a tale of love and romance and made it unforgettable in the style that Hollywood is uniquely capable of. Breathtaking visuals made it seem like you were there, YOU were aboard the Titanic. You could almost smell the salt air and feel the wind on your face.
Much has been written about the Titanic. Many questions have been asked about its Captain and crew; and countless researchers have studied infinite details about her voyage and have written countless books on the subject. Yet I wonder why it is that in spite of the lasting sensationalism and endless curiosity about the night the Titanic was ripped open by a giant iceberg and sank, little has been learned about this deeply symbolic tragedy. We have missed the point entirely, not seeing the forest for the trees.
The Titanic was proclaimed unsinkable. It was the firmest belief of its builders that their state of the art technological marvel was built so well that nothing could stand in its way. This high density hubris was later downplayed and even denied, but whatever denials were voiced after the fact cannot change the facts in evidence that prove quite clearly that Titanic's builders did believe their ship was so powerful and so advanced that it really could not sink like every other ship in the sea. The single verifiable fact to support that assertion is the small number of lifeboats installed on the ship; not nearly enough to save all souls aboard. Not nearly enough. The builders did not see a need to place sufficient life boats on the Titanic to carry all passengers. The last thing they believed possible was a need for lifeboats. They were indeed so full of themselves that they believed they had conquered the ocean with their money and their steel and their world class cutting edge technology. They'd thought of everything, they were certain of that. They were in love with themselves and certain they had achieved the status of modern miracle makers. They were wrong.
Have our modern men of money, steel and science learned anything from the abject humiliation of Titanic's builders? Or haven't they in fact chalked it up to hundred year old technology that is nowhere near the sophistication of our own cutting edge, modern technology? Yes, the Titanic's builder/owners egotism was silly but our own egotism is fully warranted. That was then but this is now.
Oh really. I'd have to say that the lesson has been missed entirely by the very same people today as their historical counterparts from a hundred years ago, both of which were and are every bit as high on identical hubris, and every bit as blind to the simple fact that in a hundred years from now all of this current cutting edge technology will look like silly tinker toys to the science and technology star chamber of the future. What makes a little bit of humility such an impossibility? Especially when it is incontestably clear that not a man on this earth knows all. Not a man on this earth is above nature. Humility would seem a common sense attribute, would it not? But when have any of these men ever allowed common sense to get in their way?
What is this willful insistence that 'we' are always the most superior beings in the universe, regardless of ordinary feet-on-the-floor reality? Why does this idiotic belief prevail in spite of the steady stream of tragic examples that prove we're not half as superior as we like to tell ourselves we are? How do they do it? How do they ignore their abundance of failures, errors and losses as if they didn't exist? How can a thing both be and not be at the same time?
Easy. Semantics plus double think. It's easy to invent tidy imaginary categories to place blown up space shuttles in; categories that cannot touch self-excusing arrogance with a ten foot pole. Categories made up out of whole cloth that are systematically deemed anomalies instead of constant colossal failures.
An example of Formula One S+DT (semantics and double-think) we are all forced to contend with is the created impossible category of "side effects" in pills. There is no such thing as an effect on the side of anything. Every effect is a full effect. Death is not a side effect, it is up front and in your face every bit as much as the touted effects the pills manufacturers want to use for marketing their single unit doses of chemicals. To call the terrible effects of pills "side effects" is an ingenious marketing technique, actually separating the bad from the good; at least in the mind's eye, even though no such separation is remotely possible. In this way the truly horrible failures of industry and technology can be separated from the illusion of progress we are sold. So-called progress that in fact amounts to mostly less-than-overwhelming successes.
And yes I am sorry but they are less than overwhelming. Overwhelming successes are few and far between. When was the last time the captains of science and industry literally knocked your socks off? Since President Kennedy decided to send a man to the moon, there really haven't been that many truly, totally new, earth shattering, life changing, paradigm shifting technological successes. Which is strange really, considering the gob smacking amounts of money taken by the Pentagon, er, the government, from the people, to lavish upon the spoiled and pointless sector of scientific R&D. Weapons technology has advanced to levels beyond comprehension, need or want, but we're still using telephones, washers and dryers, and driving gas guzzling cars like our grandparents did.
But I digress. The marketing strategy of S+DT pretends it is blasé' reality to separate technology's horrendous failures from the glorious personal status, power and profits of for-profit scientific pursuit. Formula One S+DT is brilliant, even if it is completely dishonest, unethical and downright mind borking for average people to contend with. Without their perfected power-marketing techniques to sell perception control to the masses, the wizards of modern Invention For Profit would not be able to pretend to live up to their untouchable gospel mythology of self superiority, superhuman capability, record breaking brilliance, and advanced though impossible elevation in human intelligence, multidimensional vision, and general superstar quality.
HORK.
To put it simply, it is all total bullshit. Where's the beef? Sure, Velcro is neato but is the world a better place for it? Hardly. No matter how many shocking and destructive outcomes inflicted on us all, regardless of how many tragic and deadly failures that modern technocrats deliver to us, from Chernobyl and Fukushima to for-profit medicine and for-profit justice and for-profit war to for-profit global privatization and monopolization known as globalization, to life defiling nature insulting GMO's, none of the millions of tons of human carnage and toxic fallout is ever acknowledged, apologized for, or admitted to. Never do we see those responsible, the revered super luminaries of staggeringly costly unprofitable killing technologies, or extremely profitable but dubious, deadly or just plain toxic technologies, stepping up to the plate with hat in hand to admit responsibility and apologize for lost lives, damaged health, destroyed cities, irreparable ecological damage, irradiated lands, poisoned air, soil and water. Never do we hear those responsible for the poisoning and destruction of everything we depend on for life and health confessing with heartfelt apology for yet another obscenely expensive, incomprehensibly destructive, technological, scientific, medical, legal, congressional, military or professional failure of biblical proportion, which is precisely what they are time and time again. The face in the camera says things that sound right but the arms and legs of the corporation are doing something else entirely. Standard Formula Two: Say What They Want To Hear But Do What You Want To Do. Lying is standard operating procedure. They lie even when they don't have to lie.
The timeless and valuable lesson of exchanging raging idiotic hubris for a tad of honest humility has not been learned. By the looks of it, at least in America, it probably never will be learned.
Part of the problem may be a matter of definitions. How do average people define success and how do the types of men who pull together money and talent to create star wars, deep ocean oil rigs, mega factory farming, TV Dinners and nuclear weapons define success? If their definition of success is making a slew of money while gaining social status, fame and power then blowing up Hiroshima and Nagasaki would be a stunning success. To average humanity, it could never be a success to incinerate hundreds of thousands of innocent people in the blink of an eye, and leave hundreds of thousands more suffering unspeakable agonies for which there is no relief or repair. This would be a terrible, traumatic, shameful failure, impossible to make up for; at least in the eyes of those who don't see the definition of success as having anything to do with the mass accumulation of personal wealth, status and power regardless of costs to others. In fact, average people would consider that to be a crime, and a very serious crime at that. A death penalty crime. There's just no excuse for that kind of behavior, we ordinary folk would say, at least a fair number of us. What better definition of criminality is there than profiting oneself at the expense of others, by force or by lies with depraved indifference to the damages and suffering caused to others. Greed is not good. Greed is flat out evil.
That shameless, self serving, sociopathic greed is the very definition of evil was something not lost on those who engage in it. In fact, in order for these types to rise to their current positions of crushing, shouting down dominance and the shameless eating of our living bodily flesh before our very eyes every single day of the year, they knew they had to "do something" about the public perception that who they are and what they do is "evil". They had to find a way to magically separate the evil from the deed; an optical illusion that seems to cleanse the evil out of the greed. They knew they had to head it off at the pass, beat the complainants to the punch, discredit the objective reporters of gob smacking, undeniable facts which every man, woman and child would easily see with their own innocent eyes - specifically that what these greedy, nasty, selfish people were up to was nothing less than calculated and shameless undermining and termite like destruction of our country. This, they knew, had to be turned into the unimportant "side effect" of an otherwise totally glorious top of the line, prestigious, award winning success; i.e. an organized crime-athon taking all wealth from all people leaving economies crushed, all living things indebted for the rest of time, and the global population reduced to dirt sucking poverty.
You and I and other normal human beings would have a tough time coming up with a way to spin that kind of offensive, malodorous shit into gold, but it would not be tough at all for these types. The alchemy of turning mountainous piles of stinking, diseased hog shit into super sonic futuristic green and democratic peace and freedom rail cars filled with silken threads of pure "we are one" happiness and joy gold is possibly the one and only real talent that these supreme pricks truly possess.. They can turn any shit anywhere into something the public at large will perceive as good, or at the very least not nearly all that bad so shut up about it. Damn them.
Who can tell them they are wrong for believing that force gets you whatever you want, fast? It does. A gun to the head makes rape so much easier. Who can argue with them that lying, cheating, stealing, raping, murdering, extorting, framing, making things up and denying reality are weapons with no equal? Decent people are defenseless against them. An expertly told lie can chop the head right off any honest Joe, at least it can when they do it. They are not beginners at this stuff. They are the undisputed Kung Fu masters of deception and crushing their enemies into submission or a bloody pulp, which ever comes first. Because they excel in means of criminal action, they mistake themselves to be superior beings to the rest of the human race which does not see things or value life the way they do.
While they believe they are the unequivocal superiors of all humanity because of their unrivaled success at creating wealth through synchronized acts of sociopathic organized, global crime, they have fallen into the same trap of embarrassing delusional grandiosity that big name, big dollar movers and shakers throughout all ages of modernity seem to be inflicted with. ANYbody can bonk somebody else over the head and take their stuff, you don't even have to be able to read to behave like a thug. Literally ANYbody, of any age, any gender, any intelligence level, any level of education or lack thereof, ANY body, can use brute force, lies and Genghis Khan methodology to kill people and take their stuff. There is nothing clever about this. It requires no talent. It is not proof of superiority over anyone. In fact, this is what we normal people would call being a "Loser". Big time. A Big, Weak, Pussy-Baby Loser Asshole Chump, to give the exact technical term. (I'll bet you didn't know that technical term did you? Amazing all the sheeott I know, ain't it?) BWPLAC, "bwip-lack": A festering eternal sore on the tender backside of the world. Always has been. Always will be. What is wrong with these people and when Dear Lord will they ever go away and leave us alone?
The answer dear Nell and Roger is "never". They will never fork off and leave us in peace and sanity. Why? Because they have nothing better to do than to obsess over and plan out the many ways they can use to torture this world completely to insanity and death. When they've killed every living thing, poisoned every bit of ground, air and water, decimated every fish in the sea, blown up every flying thing, bird and beast, when every child has been fully molested and blown into red mist, when every adult has been humiliated and dehumanized to the point of regressing to boneless primordial ancestors who must kill themselves just to make the goddam pain finally end...when nothing is left but a stinking, smoking ball of death and decay and the hugest pile of cash, gold and jewels you ever saw in your life, then they will step forward out of their state of the art secret underground lair, beat their chest like a puny gorilla and proclaim with unrivaled stupidity, "I WIN! I HAVE GOT IT ALL TO MYSELF AND I HAVE DESTROYED MY ENEMY ENTIRELY! THE WHOLE OF THE WORLD IS MINE! I AM GOD!"
A bit anticlimactic I would think without a frenzied round of applause and cheers of "Hooray!" "Well done!" "What a man!" and all that sort of thing. But there will be nothing there to respond one way or the other. Not even a bird to fly overhead and shit on his suit jacket. Not even a pig to grunt and leave a puddle of pig shit in his honor. Not a daisy left to make a "I'm The Biggest Winner EVER!" Same-Day-Delivery bouquet. Not even a leaf to fall gently to the ground as if to say, "I'm blown away!". Not a single thing will be moving except billowing trails of smoke and the stench of burning corpses. Yeah boy howdy, what a winner. What a superior being. What a dickhead.
Hey wait a minute. Isn't this the story of Satan's rebellion against God? Didn't Satan say, "I'm better than you are, I can control the world, I have the power and the glory and I'm smarter and more Godlike than you are?" I'm paraphrasing of course, it was something along those lines. And didn't God say, "Bite me you wad of toad crap! You're dreaming!" Or something along those lines.., and then didn't the angels all start throwing punches and taking sides, some going with Satan, some staying with God?
Are all of these greedy, Godless pricks Satan's fingertips incarnate, stomping all over decent humanity with utter disdain and total jealousy, being destructive, illogical, obnoxious, selfish, arrogant and mind explodingly idiotic, just for the sake of trying to hurt and offend God Almighty?
Could it be true?
Nah!
Chortle, snort.
Sounds pretty good though. It does seem to answer a whole bunch of questions, doesn't it? Maybe we ought to try to fake them out, you know, when you walk by, say, some big banker scum-bag, just walk by and go, "Hey! How's Satan doing? Heard from him lately? What's he been up to?" And see if they spill the beans before catching themselves. Like, "Oh he's FINE. He's doing great in fact. Just heard from him this morning when he called out our daily orders. He said "Keep on forking everyone and everything and don't stop till they're all dead! Do you hear me?" And we all laughed and said, "Yes we hear you Satan, Lord and Master of we the evil, hollow minions of pointless, meaningless existence! Duh we hear you! We have it memorized, you say it every day! JEEEEEZ!"
How likely do you think that might be, say, on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being not likely and 10 being absolutely likely?
A minus 72?
Yeah. That's the same thing I got. Minus 72.
Still, you always have to check out every possibility. You never know. If we could just get pictures of these guys bare butts we'd probably find little pointed red tails on them. I have no doubt about that. No wonder they keep those butts covered at all costs.
Gee whiz, I really digressed there. Sorry about that. It wasn't even an acid flashback or anything, I'm just naturally weird. Cool, eh? You're hardly the first to say, "no". But wait.. hang on a minute please, let me get back into my serious mood and get all sober and stuff again so I can tell you more symbolic insights I had about the Titanic and the former country known as America.
America. Geez I miss that place. It was a great place. Not perfect. Screwed up in fact. Miserably. But they knew the difference between right and wrong, had lots more fun money to spend, had more great music than you could ever hear all of, had Mimosas at fancy hotel brunches at two in the afternoon for like $7 per person, and had real live belly dancing right afterwards where you could sit and eat and watch exotic gyrating ladies while discover ing amazing new fruits like Asian Pears and stuff like that. We don't have that anymore. Now we have Achtung! 71 Shots Fired Police Thugs and creepy airport twist-o-wads that grab the crotches of five year olds, and nuns, and crippled people, to make you feel SECURE. This is a very different place. I don't like it here at all. Plus it's falling apart at the seams like an old loaf of bread. It's leaving crumbs all over the place. Dang it.
Hey do you remember back when we used to could go get like any food we wanted and it would have no MSG on it whatsoever? EVER? And back when there was no such thing as aspartame or any other Just-Like-Home-Made-Special-Chemical Warfare-Insecticide Recipe All Natural "low calorie sweetener"? Gosh, I sure do. I even remember fresh, local produce, just picked that morning, still warm with life giving sunshine. Boy, those were the days weren't they? Those were the days before the USS Satanic purposely blew out its own portholes and blamed it on the Middle East, working overtime to sink this ship of state and drown us all like a clutch of kittens in a burlap sack. Glug glug. Evil people are no fun at all. None. That much I can tell you for sure.
But seriously, think about what else was missed entirely in the true story of the Titanic. Have you ever heard of this country referred to as a "ship of state" before? Well please don't miss the glaring metaphor. This is the Titanic. Complete with not nearly enough lifeboats for all the passengers. Complete with delusional, detached spoiled rich people who have everything there is to have but don't see any reason to stop there, alongside an entire coast to coast size collage of people who have been rolled and mugged in the Wall Street Alley of the All Star Thugs, and then again raped and pillaged by the Federal Reserve Bank which is not federal, has no reserves and isn't even a bank, but that's okay, our dearly elected are on the job. They'd catch something like that in a heartbeat. Unless there was enough money involved to make them look somewhere else. Well what do you know, they never saw a thing. I can see it from here, 3,000 miles away, but I guess you actually have to LOOK or you never will be able to see it. More bribes gentlemen? Would you like fries with that? Or hookers and champagne? You got it. Film at 11, unless you go along.
So here goes the ship of state sailing along, most of the passengers asleep or feelin drowsy, some staying up late and getting smashed at every bar on the way back to the cabin, then the good Captain says "G'nite Lads!" and heads off to his own cabin for some microwave popcorn and hot buttered porn. But back in the mailroom, an overworked communications clerk has piles of inane personal messages from spoiled rich people they want sent immediately to other spoiled rich people so the overworked clerk has to hurry to click them all out in Morse code and nobody's there to help him out; so when a real message of actual life and death import comes through to him he looks at it and throws it in the trash can.
Why? Because infantile rich spoiled people sending messages to "Pookie" and "Wufflebits" are always given priority treatment over data like "we're all gonna die if we don't look out for damned icebergs". Don't be stupid Pookie. Money is the highest value of man and the truest. How much money you have is the exact determination of how much you matter above all other people. So if you're a certified moon pie moron who gets off on licking orangutan belly buttons, but you have a few billion dollars in the bank, you're the most important person in the room no matter what room it is. Whatever inane drivel comes out of your mouth takes precedence over all other information including the ship is sinking and Godzilla is eating your grandmother in the parlor. Yes that's right. No matter how much of a twisted scum bag you are, because of your billions, ill gotten or otherwise, you will matter more than everyone else, even more than people who actually are worth a damn in this world.
And please let me reiterate that that kind of money, personal billions, personal hundreds of millions, are ALL ill gotten. There is no other way to get that kind of money. You can't EARN it. What job could you do that would pay you that kind of money? The answer is easy, no legitimate job. There is no such thing as a legitimate job that pays anybody millions or billions of dollars. No such thing. If there were such a thing everybody would be working those jobs, but there is no such thing as a legitimate means to EARN billions or hundreds of millions of dollars. Which means what? Those who have it didn't earn it. They got it some other way. As previously mentioned, crime does pay. It pays extremely well. I don't know about you but the only way I can think of to get shit loads of that kind of money is via crime, one way or another. What do you think? Got any other ideas? I didn't think so. So you see? Once again, plain old ordinary common sense shows us the answers to questions we're supposed to think are too complex to understand. Nonsense. Just hold it up to the light and sniff it and if it stinks like a dead fish you'll know it's just another big fat lie. Like all the other big fat lies.
Oh dear. Did I trail off the path again? Jeepers, I am sorry about that. Where was I? Oh yes. The way to determine the true value of a human being is by counting the money in his bank account.
Now I know what you're saying, you're saying, "But Ang, that's just not true! Money is no indicator of human value or importance or any other thing! Money is an external, it has nothing to do with being human. It's irrelevant. It is meaningless. It says nothing about the person holding it. It means nothing. It determines nothing!"
I know that and you know that, but THEY don't see it that way. Understand something. We are talking about people who can, with a perfectly straight face, say, "Oh come and try our latest, newest, amazingly new, breakthrough PILL! It will cure your headache in two minutes flat and make you see little pink angels flying around your head. It has a teeny little side effect that is of no real concern, it can make your heart stop. But what are the odds? It's perfectly safe! Honest!" And they can, will and do, aggressively, relentlessly, shamelessly market this new heart stopper pill directly to med students across the nation, and they pay big docs big bucks to endorse it and say its great and sell it to colleagues and friends, and the drug company pretends there is no such thing as people dropping dead left and right from their heart stopping. Death is just a SIDE effect. Those dead people must have been doing something WRONG with their pills. Those dead people probably only died to try to make us look bad. Those dead people had to have been weird sexual perverts and mentally unstable because normal peoples hearts don't stop, only freaky peoples hearts stop. Probably crack addicts or holocaust deniers because good, decent normal people will only achieve freedom from pounding headaches. Those dead people were doing it wrong. They were bad people. Pills good. Dead people bad. Buy our pills today so that you can dance through the daisies and so we can get even richer than God and his first cousin and his whole family on his mother's side. Big Pharma. What pigs.
You know what? I gotta level with you. I think I'm just too goofy right now to go on trying to show you the serious parallels I see between the unsinkable Titanic hitting the iceberg and going down while the band played on until the very last moment... which is totally bizarre, just like our dry-humping, mad-dog media-clown 24/7 news shows made of perfectly disconnected All Natural Twinkie filling (hydrogenated whipped pig lard with poisoned cottonseed oil and USDA organic phenylacetaterseeyalaterwookiebitsandpiecesthyl, plus foaming agents) with bacon bits on top for your scholarly edification. ...Yep. That'll UP yer EYE QYEW fOr sUre. Fan-tastic.
I don't know, what do you think? Too goofy? Not goofy enough? Does anyone give a rat's ass on a rolling donut?
I wish I had a picture of that.
Okay. That does it. Too goofy it is.
I have to go.
Really.
I do.
Big kiss.
On the CHEEK.
The FACE cheek.
Oh never mind the kiss. Handshake n' bake. There you go.
Later gator.
My voice now fading out...
Hey watch out for icebergs you unsinkable miracle of nature!
As I disappear into a tunnel...
R-I-I-I-N-N-G-G!
Is that a phone ringing?
Yes? Who is it?
"IT'S GOD ON LINE ONE".
Oh WOW.
And it's for YOU. WOW-WOW.
You must be VERY special!
I knew it all along.
I... am not special at all.
So...I'm gonna go get a donut WHILE YOU'RE ON THE PHONE WITH GOD.
Catch me up later tho'. K?
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