The ‘Annual Presidents’ Day Sales Event!’ (or) Who in the hell were Washington & Lincoln, anyway!?

It is the ‘Annual Presidents Day Sales Event’ today, an occasion we are assured many of you celebrate by going down to automobile sellers to purchase cars (not!) at what we consumers of mass quantities are told are the ‘best prices of the year!’ Isn’t that what ‘Presidents’ Day’ is all about, after all? Having knock-down, drag-‘em-out blockbuster sales?

Frankly, I wonder just how many people even know that this perennial national holiday ISN’T actually about car sales at all, but about remembering several famous former founding leaders of our nation? As far as those under 20 are concerned, I harbor few allusions that their sole awareness of American history is limited to examples of commercial sales opportunism like this (at best).

Reflect, for a moment, upon the sophomoric, tacky, banal and ‘dumbed-down-so-that-even-the-three-brain-cell idiots-in-the room-can appreciate-it’ Presidents’ Day advertising commercials sponsored by Honda (a company I used to respect for its high-quality vehicles) wherein hyper-Hollywoodised parodies of George Washington & Abraham Lincoln glibly cavort about a car lot, hawking the merits of automobiles. I firmly believe that this is probably about as much as the average high school student actually knows about these two individuals, period.

In the same perverse spirit of American mercantilism, almost every national holiday of any note has now been reduced, ipso facto, to a similar state of sublime commercial ridiculousness. We can thank the corporations of America for this unsettling socio-economic dynamic, of course.

Ah! Corporations! Periodically, I launch a string of unconstrained written pejoratives at various permutations of corporatism in the United States of America. These diatribes are usually couched in suitably inoffensive and genteel phrases that shy away from the seriously offensive terms I’d PREFER to use, were it not for the vaunted delicacy of politically correct leftist liberal Puritans who are quick to take offense over use of verbal scatology in literature.

Corporatism, as I see things, is about as close to something that is truly evil as an avowed non-believer (substitute ‘atheist’ is that doesn’t rock the foundations of your precious little religious beliefs) may come in describing an economic dynamic force that daily distorts, mongrelises and devastates the quality of our proletarian daily lives.

Sadly enough, the majority of modern Americans are either 1) too preoccupied with their own petty domestic concerns, 2) too hopelessly brainwashed by the quality of media’s egregious advertising they are daily exposed to, 3) completely self-absorbed in their worship of materialism’s economic superfluities to the point of brain-death (read: addiction to non-essential & largely hedonistic consumer goods), or 4) just too plain ignorant to care about anything but what their FACEBOOK peers are saying about them.

Judging by an analysis of intellectual capabilities of any given group scrutinized, the last factor is likely the most telling of all, since political scientist Charles Murray’s and psychologist Richard Herrnstein’s mid-90s study of intellect in our nation (‘The Bell Curve’) reveals that fully half of any population examined is what we would term ‘below average’ in their ability to think rationally, reflect intellectually on matters and draw factual conclusions from available evidence at hand.

In other words, substituting less elegant words for finer academic (and politically acceptable) counterparts, they’re just too effing stupid to distinguish sh*t from moist brown soil! As such, they are the pliant, un-molded effluent material which corporations thrive upon and which commercialism exploits so mercilessly in its unconstrained (at worst and poorly regulated at best) economic effort to make obscene amounts of profit for majority stockholders & owners from rampant gullibility.

As a direct result, corporations, that have long been accorded legal rights just like discrete individuals, are consistently allowed to wreak absolute havoc across the American landscape and in almost every case get entirely away with their economic depredations. The most recent blatant example of this will likely turn out to be the Pacific Gas & Electric Company, whose criminal disregard for basic tenets of industrial safety set the stage for (or at the very least co-facilitated) a series of devastating California wildfires this past year or two. Given that company’s power, and the massive cadre of its legal advisors (read attorneys), in all likelihood PG&E will be allowed to file for bankruptcy and thus avoid as much as several tens of billions of dollars in insurance liabilities.

Of course, PG&E isn’t entirely to blame for this most recent and unnatural debacle, since we can also thank the thousands of brain-dead home owners themselves (the ones who recently lost everything in these fires) who 1) elected to build homes in forested areas that are highly susceptible to man-caused incipient conflagrations, and 2) too effing ignorant of the possible consequences to help prevent such fires by clearing adequate fire-buffer zones around their property (or purchasing fully adequate home insurance policies).

Other recent examples of the excesses of mass corporate society abound, of course. Ask anyone who lost his shirt back during the real estate bubble that exploded in 2008, thanks to events set in motion by the basic greed of investors, hedge-fund managers and speculators. In that instance, most of the prime offenders were not only ‘excused’ and absolved of their legal culpability, but actually subsidized in their subsequent recovery with our (the taxpayer’s) money! Hello Goldman-Sachs (and their Wall Street cohorts)! In any less wishy-washy nation, those corporate offenders would have been lined up along pock-marked concrete walls, given a blind-fold and executed on the spot (it worked for England, in dealing Irish rebels, didn't it?).

But not in America, where we toss a few materialistic consumer baubles out to placate the masses, wash everyone’s mind out with human-resources platitudes and then resume exactly the same behavior, over and over, ad infinitum. Sure enough, before long and after a certain amount of grumbling (both private and in the press) has expiated much of the more immediate sting of unnecessary economic losses, we’re right back to square-one once more, with the corporations continuing to screw over the ever-trusting public once again, as if nothing had ever happened. In the military we had a number of apt and highly impolite expressions to describe the unavoidable consequence of this effect. One of the most descriptive was ‘BOHICA’ (‘Bend over…here it comes again’). I think you get the picture without dwelling too much on the obvious, here.

Sadly, however, corporations have been getting away with this sort of legally sanctioned murder for almost as long as this nation has been in existence. It’s bad enough that they abuse our senses with juvenile advertising campaigns (such as the particularly egregious ‘Presidents’ Day’ campaigns), but the full extent of their economic skullduggery is far in excess of these mere aesthetics.

And why, you may well ask, does this sort of grossly insulting and economically damaging excess go on in perpetuity in America? Because our legal system, in its infinite wisdom, granted corporatized commercial entities the same constitutional rights conferred upon ordinary, everyday individual citizens. In other words, in the eyes of the law, a chartered ‘corporation’ is constitutionally valued on exactly the same level as Mr. Private Citizen. Although a rational analysis of exactly what the differences are between a private citizen and a corporate commercial enterprise would quickly dispel any uncertainties, that is nevertheless the legal status quo we have in modern America. However, as any lawyer will quickly hasten to correct you, ‘the law’ and ‘justice’ are two completely unrelated concepts. The sheer, patent absurdity of that assumption’s ludicrous reasoning (that private individuals and commercial corporations share virtually identical rights, under the American constitution) couldn’t be misconstrued even by a three-brain-cell moron (or is the correct descriptive phrase ‘intellectually challenged person’ these days? I always confuse these PC distinctions).

At any rate, here we are with legally sanctioned corporatised exploitation as the norm in our nation. And as always, a vast majority of our fellow citizens have been so socially conditioned to go along with conventional practices that every time a new and equally outrageous example of ‘corporate coitus’ arises that everyone reflectively bends over in anticipation… How nice for the corporations! An apt if possibly politically incorrect analogue to characterise this would be a woman who actually looks forward to being raped maliciously and brutally violated. Obviously, I exaggerate here and please excuse the liberty I have taken in employing this admittedly unpleasant phraseological comparison, but delicacies aside, it certainly fits the circumstance, allegorically speaking.

All of us in modern America should pause and reflect on the blatant consumer rape (for that is effectively what it amounts to) that goes on around us every single day. And yet ‘corporatism’ is as much a part of modern America as apple pie and the American flag. As much a part and to such an extent that we don’t even stop to think about what it is, what it does to us and what consequences it has for any possible functional continuity of our national way of life (let along its impact on the quality of our lives).

Personally, I am no longer convinced that ‘the American way of life’ is either beneficial or condonable, given the extent of these ‘normalised rapes’ of the individual that corporations subsist upon. Our much ballyhooed and vaunted ‘freedoms’ are daily strangled to death in protracted legal exercises that have virtually removed any semblance of real benefit or greater gain for the individual citizen. While I do not actively or passively promote the overthrow of our present way of life, I experience no reticence or hesitation at all over declaring our form of capitalistic materialism to be both morally and ethically terminally ill.

Unfortunately, the entire history of the human race consists of the smarter (and therefore usually more powerful & wealthy) members of society exploiting the ignorant and weaker ones, a human trait that has certainly has been around since the dawn of recorded history, and simply seized upon, refined and ‘Americanised’ though our unique expression of corporate commercialism that is modern America’s economic nature.

I have returned to this theme (virulent anti-corporatism) a great many times in the past and this time I think the principal catalyst has been the ongoing screwing-over my wife and I have been experiencing from AT&T, as good an example of rapacious corporatism as any I can think of at the moment. Therefore, let me get off my lofty soapbox for a moment and get down to the associated (if highly tangential) nitty-gritty.

My wife is, coincidentally, a retired, former Pacific Bell switch system installation engineer, having worked for AT&T’s collateral corporation since she came to this country from Hong Kong, back in the late 60s. She was a part of that telecommunications combine throughout the turbulent multi-decade period during which time the original AT&T corporate behemoth was rendered by anti-trust litigation into a series of smaller ‘baby-Bells’. Those days are now long gone, thanks to changing national attitudes and a fading away of ‘anti-trust’ concerns in our modern ‘anything to make money, anything goes’ age, but in its place we now have the new & improved multinational corporate dynamic.

When she retired, she was accorded certain privileges as a so-called ‘telephone pioneer’ (this is actually a social organisation comprised of former long-time telephone employees and careerists) and given reduced rates on certain telephone services, among other things. Perhaps understandably, as a loyal member of the AT&T ‘family’ of professional telecommunications employees, she remained quite supportive of AT&T over the years immediate before (and after) the rise of cellular communications technology.

Thus, we’ve kept the hard-wired telephone land-line we’ve had for about three or more decades, despite the fact that we both have modern ‘smartphone’ devices and have almost unthinkingly reharded a ‘land-line’ as an important communications link to have at home.

Meanwhile, we began to experience extreme difficulties with that telephone service over the years that got progressively worse and worse. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that almost every time these difficulties occurred, it was during the rainy, winter season. Duh!

So, every year at the height of the rainy season our AT&T land-line would predictably crap out, leaving us with no residential telephone service. And each time we’d call AT&T to complain about this we’d be advised that it was likely ‘a problem with our home’s internal phone wiring system’, and that under the revised agreement with ‘A&T consumers’, we would assume any responsibility for the costs of all repairs needed to fix our line (a visiting AT&T repair person would later tell me that this is a rote litany that AT&T low-on-the-food-chain customer contacts automatically read off a pre-prepared script to that effect). And this is assuming that you could even navigate through their complicated and confusing automatic ‘telephone tree’ response.

An arrangement would then be made for an AT&T serviceman to come by to ostensibly check out the line to determine responsibility for repairs and each time, after going through all the sham checking rigamaole the repairman would confirm that it wasn’t our home’s wiring, but “some problem with the main feed cable”. As if we didn’t already know this, fer crissakes!

This same recurring routine has been going on now for about 5 years and each time we generally have no AT&T land-line service until the warmer Spring weather dries out the dilapidated old (1950s vintage) feed cable we are connected to.

This winter, the oft-repeated scenario replayed itself yet again and we’ve been without landline service for several weeks already. However, a week ago, AT&T dropped in on us without warning, requesting access to our back yard once again (since the telephone pole where everything links-up is over in the corner of our yard). This involved a crew running a brand-new cable (to replace the old one, hence a process that went on for several days as they struggled to run the new line through the spite-jungle of our immediate neighbor’s trees.

All of this wouldn’t be half inconvenient were it not for the fact that each time they AT&T crews needed access to our yard, we had to keep our large husky dog inside and deny her access to her accustomed happy pooping grounds (our yard), keeping her large-sized doggy-door closed for long periods. This also requires one of us to stay home and basically spin our wheels for most of the day waiting for the crew to finish up the day’s work, wasting our time and thoroughly screwing up whatever the day’s agenda may have been. To round out the inconveniences, whenever an appointment is made for an AT&T repair crew to drop by, we are told they will come by ‘sometime between 8AM and 5PM’. Oh great! That really helps loads! Might as well just say ‘between 8AM and never’.

Today AT&T scheduled another one of their ‘pro forma’ home phone checks (as per above), so we spent most of the entire day waiting for that visit, only to have an engineer finally show up well after noon to fill us in on the bigger picture. To wit (and it is a somewhat complicated mess), AT&T crews had drawn a new cable from well west of this neighborhood to our backyard phone pole, where the new cable was supposed to be spliced in to an east-to-west connecting cable. Except, guess what..? Somehow AT&T hadn’t gotten the word out to the east-to-west cable section installation crew that they were supposed to draw their section in for the connection.

The result? The ‘new’ cable is only half installed and this engineer (who visited us) told us that ‘engineering needs to get on construction’s arse (not his word, but it fits)’ so as to complete the project and restore everyone’s phone service in our neighborhood who relies upon that old, leaky, dilapidated 50s vintage cable.

What all this translates to, boiled down to its most lucid & least confusing form, is that AT&T has more problems completing tasks like this than the biblical Tower of Babel had in constructing itself. And AT&T is burdened with what they call ‘legacy equipment’, a handy phrase that translates to ‘ancient, antiquated, hard-wired technology from decades ago’…unlike AT&T’s modern competitors (like Verizon & Xfinity).

I am personally convinced that a lot of the problem may be attributed to the fact that AT&T as a corporation has become so immensely huge and unwieldy that it is now such an absolute paragon of inefficient, hugely complicated and ponderously convoluted ineptitude that it will take years to catch up. Further, it’s pretty obvious that AT&T has been subcontracting work to other firms (some of whom seem to consist of Spanish-speaking Hispanics from God-knows-where), so gigantic screw-ups like this are even more likely to get all balloxed-up in future.

I don’t have to remind any of you that AT&T is presently involved in a fierce market share competition with existing Verizon and Xfinity services (not to mention others), so it’s small wonder that the entire company doesn’t just spontaneously explode from sheer Brownian Motion effects.

When I asked the AT&T guys (none of whom seemed to have even a glimmer of the existing overall company strategic plan for developing wire services) when we could expect modern fiberoptic cable service, each time I was met with either a blank stare and a shrug or a throw-away remark that ‘It’s coming’.

Clearly, this does not tend to foster happy consumer campers, least of all me, but it’s symptomatic of many massive American corporate organisations that have become so large and grossly unwieldy that extremely inefficient operations such as those detailed above are now the standard norm.

To add insult to injury, getting through to someone with horsepower at AT&T is all but impossible, since AT&T’s wonderful (sarcasm) human resources and customer relations has made it a Sisyphean task to register discontent and/or customer dissatisfaction with any higher AT&T authority. It almost seems as if the automated ‘phone-tree’ response system one gets when one rings up AT&T customer service is deliberately and maliciously contrived to frustrate meaningful consumer feedback! (This status quo is a shared characteristic with just about every large, corporate entity these days). Got a problem, bunky? Go fu*k yourself…and have a nice day. Portions of this call may be recorded for quality & training purposes.

If any sane and reasonably intelligent person can successfully navigate his or her way through this Jonathan Swiftian farce of a scenario, I will not only eat my hat, I’ll sautee it and eat it on the half-shell as well!

OK. So, to disengage from this backstory and return to my previous introductory remarks about American corporatism, the larger commercial entities get, the further detached from any vestige of reality they become and the more the average individual finds him or herself submerged in a great tsunami of frustrating banality that threatens to destroy any last remaining aspect of a reasonably ‘human’ quality of life in our modern, technologized society.

Neo-anarchist John Zerzan, once a contemporary confrere of UCB’s Dr. Ted Kaczynski, has some extraordinarily radical views on the subject of corporations that make for interesting reading if you’re interested. Many other authoritative authors have weighed in on the deleterious role massive corporations (such as AT&T) play in needlessly complicating our lives, but no matter who you listen to, it’s becoming very clear that all of these complexities are presupposed by several ineluctable dynamic considerations that are nearly impossible to modulate and/or control.

A few of these are that 1) rampant, burgeoning demographics are making already scarcely manageable socio-economic situations even more unmanageable, and 2) the overall intelligence of humankind is not rising appreciably, nor will it in future (if anything, the reverse is true…populations are becoming more ignorant and irrational, viewed as a whole process).

As I have pointed out many times in the past, we have still not reached a crisis point where the number of resource-consuming human inhabitants on this planet will irrevocably and exponentially hasten the demise of the world we live on (even though its demise through sheer overpopulation and outstripping of resources is ultimately assured). Yet, there seems to be absolutely no interest at all on the part of anyone, save for a few wild-eyed visionaries, to take any preventive, prophylactic steps NOW to avert pending disaster, before it becomes too late to ignore (or resolve).

In 2018, the National Corporation for Public Broadcasting (PBS) aired a segment on their ‘American Experience’ series entitled ‘Eugenics’, in which the story of the eugenics movement of the 1920s that encompassed a large and enthusiastic segment of society was covered in interesting detail. The quoted section below is from the PBS website.

“A hybrid derived from the Greek words meaning “well” and “born,” the term eugenics was coined in 1883 by Sir Francis Galton, a British cousin to Charles Darwin, to name a new “science” through which human beings might take charge of their own evolution. The Eugenics Crusade tells the story of the unlikely –– and largely unknown –– movement that turned the fledgling scientific theory of heredity into a powerful instrument of social control. Perhaps more surprising still, American eugenics was neither the work of fanatics, nor the product of fringe science. The goal of the movement was simple and, to its disciples, laudable: to eradicate social ills by limiting the number of those considered to be genetically “unfit” –– a group that would expand to include many immigrant groups, the poor, Jews, the mentally and physically disabled, and the “morally delinquent.” At its peak in the 1920s, the movement was in every way mainstream, packaged as a progressive quest for “healthy babies.” Its doctrines were not only popular and practiced, but codified by laws that severely restricted immigration and ultimately led to the institutionalization and sterilization of tens of thousands of American citizens. Populated by figures both celebrated and obscure, The Eugenics Crusade is an often-revelatory portrait of an America at once strange and eerily familiar.”

Most regrettably, this movement was coopted by Germany’s Third Reich of the 1930s and 40s and transmogrified into a brutally inhumane, recklessly subjective effort to eradicate the Jewish race in its entirety.

Since that time, even the merest mention of eugenic theories has touched off firestorms of protest and outrage (notably among those on the socialist ‘new left’), despite the fact that in its purest form, the principal object of eugenics was at its outset to eliminate ignorance, heighten intelligence and eliminate disease and ill health. Can you even imagine a world bereft of the sort of everyday stupidity that passes for normal in our ‘stupidified’ society? A world in which reasoned and rational inquiry attempt to eliminate the blight of ignorance that is modern faith-based, emotional, populist excess? I can’t, but what a marvelous ambition!

The only fly in the ointment is that our ultimate collision with terminal, end-stage extinction would likely be considerably hastened by most provisions of eugenic theory, unless procreation was carefully regulated and modulated across the board so as to not only fill the world with intelligent people, but prevent them from outstripping available nutritional resources sufficient to sustain a reasonable population on our planet.

But this doesn’t have much bearing on present day America’s unwilling love-affair with materialistic corporate commercialism, sadly. Unless we rise up en mass and throw off the bonds of enthrallment we have all so insidiously been enslaved by, we shall all continue to suffer the fate of the damned. That is, the fate of being ‘stupidified’ to death by a commercial corporate monster that only wishes to squeeze as much money from us as possible.

I do not choose to address the few recent, supposedly ‘enlightened’ efforts made by corporate bazillionaires such as Bill & Melinda Gates and Mark Zuckerfu*ker & his wife to spread the wealth around and redistribute some of it a bit, but let’s face it, once you’re a bazillionare you can afford to toss a few baubles & coppers to the teeming masses (since it’s all carefully tax-protected and counts as deductible charity, anyway) under the guise of indulging in sincere humanitarian gestures. I do not believe for a second that those gestures are backed up by any genuine altruism or benevolence. Nor should you, in my opinion.

So, how to engage and emasculate the monster that is American corporate capitalist materialism? Regrettably, I am completely out of answers there, unless it’s to take the sort of highly misanthropic ‘direct’ action taken by Ted Kaczynski in which he began a personal vendetta of violent anarchy. Although such actions certainly catch the public’s attention, reaction is so carefully regulated by the media minions of corporate America as to render such occurrences as merely a sort of lunatic-fringe anomaly with dismissive bias.

Speaking of Kaczynski, all of us are (hopefully) to some limited degree familiar with who exactly Dr. Ted is, but hardly anyone has ever actually read his manifesto or his papers dealing with the subject of resistance to the corporate status quo. Perhaps it is time to do so. I personally found that Dr. Ted’s ideas are rather profoundly stimulating, if too radical in the application to achieve more than a limited and theoretical response comparative to that which a ‘limited yield’ nuke might.

I think I’ve previously mentioned that while at Berkeley, several decades ago, I caught a couple of Kaczynski’s lectures at UC Berkeley when he was on the staff there. I was sitting in on them (auditing), although unenrolled as a student at the time. Rather illuminating, to say the least. Ok.

The day (the ‘Presidents Day Sales Event’) is almost over now. It’s a stormy, unsettled sky that hovers above us and I have once again grotched and grumbled about the rotten, putrid and festering rot of rampant corporate commercialism that is slowly destroying America today…a society that began as a wonderful hope for a new era of enlightened society (the ‘Great American Experiment’) but that now gives evidence that it is rapidly going to hell. How acutely sad it is to think about all this and reflect on the grossly emotional ignorance that now suffices for reasoned intelligence in our (formerly) great nation.

Hopefully more than a few of you will take necessary steps in your daily life to tune out, turn off and shut down corporate commercial exploitation of humanity in your lives (but I’m not holding my breath).

Be well, citizens…