Quiet at the Top

This blog is not about me. It's about The Big Picture, my soapbox of progressive thought. I have never been one to become obsessed over one career, one hobby, or even one life plan. My favorite college professor always said that the secret of happiness is new experience, and I have consistently found this to be true. Yes, I had a general career, and I have always nurtured along a handful of generalized hobbies, but the thing that has always fascinated me has been what I call The Big Picture. I have always sought to get ahead of the curve, to look at the future not as everyone else, with their obsessive, limiting, blinders see, but as you might see if you studied the past and extrapolated into the future.

As the folksy pundits say, I don't have a dog in that hunt. I am not an economist, a TV or radio personality, a psychotherapist, an engineer, a salesman, or even a marketeer. I am Bill Maher without an audience. I am George Carlin without his brilliance. I am Bill Hicks without his humor. I am a nobody and I know it, so I have nothing to lose by telling the truth. I don't have an audience, so I am not required to entertain or I lose my job. For that matter, I don't have a job, either. I am just a guy with a computer. I may not blog in my pajamas, but then I consider anything more formal than jeans, a t-shirt, and sneakers as dress-up attire. This particular blog may be approaching only its one-year anniversary later this week, but I have been speaking my mind on my own sites and those of others for nearly a decade.

Here is what I mean by staying ahead of the curve. In the '60's I thought that America would soon have to abandon its wretched excesses, especially in regards to the need for at least a minimal level of population control. This should have been effected in an optional, coercive, not mandatory manner, and the growth of the economy should have been controlled along with the population growth. In the '70's I thought it would probably not be long before we elected an actor President. In the '80's I thought that the brazen statements and concepts spoken plainly on what I call the money channels would have at least been noticed and taken seriously by the populace. In the '90's I thought the same populace would have at least revolted over Clinton's support of NAFTA. At the beginning of this decade, I began to plan my retirement in relation to the coming housing bubble and credit crunch. Yes, you read it right. I could see it all coming from miles away. It was right there in everybody's faces; the difference was that I was paying attention. I have a number of hobbies, but they all come together under one umbrella: I am a student of modern American popular culture. The hippies were happening in the '60's; America turned in the wrong direction in the '70's; Wall Street was happening in the '80's; the globalized tech boom was happening in the '90's; and the house of cards is coming crashing down in the 2000's.

It has always been quiet at the top because nobody has ever listened to me. Yes, they always seem to listen really well after the horse has escaped from the barn and the barn is on fire, but there always seems to be a problem with their ears up until the point at which their obsessive blinders widen an they assess the damage. I am not an egomaniac; a fathead of sorts, yes, but not an egomaniac. I have never claimed to be a genius, but I have always, consistently, paid attention to what was happening all around me. No matter how much it may appear to be otherwise, neither this post nor this whole blog is about me. It's about you and your perception of the world around you. How much have you been paying attention?

Not much has been said on this blog about the housing bubble, the credit crisis, or even President Obama. That's all yesterday's news to me. I want to know where we are going tomorrow and next year. I want the whole nation to get out in front of the problem. Reacting to problems after the crises have struck is precisely how we got into this mess. It's very easy to shut the barn door long before the horse runs out and the barn catches fire, but putting out the blaze is much riskier and success is far less likely. It may surprise you to know that I don't have a strong opinion about the bailout issue one way or the other. I don't think the investment banks should be bailed out, I am totally for limiting executive compensation, and I think certain job loss and foreclosure issues should be addressed. Obama should not be rewarded or punished according to the apparent success or failure of his particular stimulus package. The problem is that far too few people feel the same way I do. Far too many voters can be too easily swayed by the manipulation of the news presented to them. If they didn't have sense enough to revolt over the aforementioned issues of the past four decades, what makes you think they will suddenly grow brains now?

Step up on my mountaintop and look at the voting populace, and pay particular attention to what is happening at CNN, Huffington Post, and the other mainstream media sources right now. Notice that I did not particularly mention Fox News. That's because Fox isn't doing it, but the two I named are. Of course Fox is Murdoch's TV edition of the far right wing. We all know that. I want you to look at those other two. I want you to notice exactly what they are doing, and I want you to particularly notice what they are not doing. Fox may be babbling their same old shovel load of bullhockey, but they are not featuring a glowing or benign story about Sarah Palin every day. The other two are. They are doing this practically every day. You may think they are doing this simply because they know she will be easy to beat in 2012 by an incumbent, but one of the intelligent, experienced Republican candidates might become a worthy opponent. This is probably true, at least somewhat, but the risk of such an election going the wrong way, although small, would be devastating to both America and the world. Much of the world already thinks we are nuts for letting the right wing stifle our obvious need for birth control promotion. What will they think when they see that monster in hooker boots in charge of the most powerful nation on earth? If you went to Vegas, and the casino told you you could bet on a certain game and the odds would be greatly in your favor that you would win $10,000, but if you lost, the croupier would put a bullet through your head, would you take that bet? Would you take it no matter how great the odds in your favor were? How desperate for money would you have to be to take that bet? From up here in the quiet, I see way too many people currently taking that bet.

The mainstream media has become way too controlling, folks, and we all need to wake up to this fact. Everybody knows who Rupert Murdoch is now, but I have been following his acquisitions of power for decades. There are too many Americans who simply don't have sense enough to question whatever they see on television. There are too many who will never read anything else I have posted on this blog because they will only read whatever is on the home page. These are the people who scare me, the ones with that little bit of dangerous knowledge. It not only matters what is said about the Wicked Witch of Wasilla, but where it is said, and the story is read by a lot more people if it appears on the home page. It is the combination of the where and the what that makes this issue so scary to me. The MSM know exactly what they are doing. They know exactly how they are controlling the populace. The why is easy: they are doing it for the money. We must all wake up and recognize this fact. We must somehow learn that even the so-called left-wing media are rarely to be trusted simply because too much money has entered the equation. If these a-holes were not paid so much to deny, delete, ignore, repeat, and obfuscate in the stories they present to us, the situation would be different, but this is the reality we have, and these overpaid buttholes are absolutely and completely not to be trusted.

The Witch is the new story. If she was not the new story, then why didn't her name and face disappear from the media last November? The economic bust has already happened. Depression 2.0 is here. We should have seen it coming decades ago and headed it off at the pass, but we were too damn busy watching Wall Street and Network without learning a thing from their obvious undercurrents of warning messages. Ya'll can just go on kidding yourselves that today's news is all about Obama and his stimulus package. A couple of years from now, long after it is already too late to put out the fire, you can look back at my little rant. You can let it all go in one ear and out the next, and things will remain quiet on my little soapbox. You can throw up your hands and say you had no idea that Obama would take so much heat for Depression 2.0 that America would be ready to join Nazi Germany in the history books. You can say that nobody told you. Certainly no one at CNN or Huffington Post is going to tell you, but wait a minute. Nobody did tell you, a nobody with no fame or fortune or hunting dogs involved. I could be wrong. I could be an idiot. I could be an egomaniac on a blog power trip. I certainly want to be wrong with all the audacity of hope I can muster. I like America and I want it to survive and prosper. One thing is for sure, though. I shall be still alive because I'm not taking that bet.