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Marie Antoinette: Monsieur Le Minister, what do you plan to do about the deficit?
Minister: Nothing, it is far too serious
William Casey's brain sits laughing in Hell as Huey Newton speeds to join him. Rather than being individually assassinated by the FBI, Huey was a victim of the mass assassination practiced on blacks and all poor people in this country. Casey, former head of the CIA and cowboy of the Iran/contra escapade, would be proud to be the victim of his own instant-cancer concoction. He was proud to be the perfection of Reaganism's death for death's sake. He would certainly be glad to see a rival like Newton caught in capital's chemical warfare against the working class.
While the adventurers of today could hardly surpass the skullduggery of the past, what they perfect is the publicity of terrorism. Theirs is a government by mystery novel. Margret Thatcher perfected this by nominating a mystery novelist as foreign secretary.
The new adventurers aren't leaving. They throw poison into our cities and kidnap our children simply to convince us that someone else is doing this, that we need them to defend us. A white man in Boston learned the spirit perfectly. He murdered his wife and then gave a black man's description to police. (He was only caught by accident; when his brothers confessed and forced the police's hand).
Today's hacks hark back to the "golden age" of exploitation. But they are Ayn Rand's supermen, not Nietzche's. They act merely as uncreative automatons to protect the system. Each is a mediocre copy of last; George Bush walks carefully in Reagan's Jack Boots while giving one ear to his media advisors. Though the CIA serves as the world's largest cocaine dealer, it is not even conscious of it's real role in capital's mind fuck. Like any superbureaucracy, it mindlessly gets money to serve it's ideology.
Today society can only be saved by the bravery of cruel cowards. AIDS is perhaps the biggest single victory of cybernetic terrorism. It easily could have been created by military psi-war or bio-war specialists. The terrorist information system separates us far enough from any concrete knowledge and control of this society that we may never know for certain. On a deeper level, this terrorist separation of people from society is AIDS ultimate creator. Our collective self-repression and our lack of social dialogue is what continues the epidemic. When objectified sexual relations rule and men subjugate women, we can never choose life.
AIDS fits perfectly into this "big stick" method of social control. Today, The "big stick" is being wielded by thousands of nasty little hands. Each hand knows only that it must swing the club against those bellow it before those above swing at it. Male homosexuals, black junkies: these people are not being murdered from hate by the top but from fear by those a little above. Racism is like drugs; the man that sells it can only use in moderation. Bush chooses race-hatred like one golf club in his bag of tricks; its only there when the game calls for it. He can just as well use macho posturing, fear of taxes, etc., if conditions demand it. The experienced inquisitor uses each means of torture, but only when appropriate. The managers of the current social terror thus let "United Colors of Benneton" co-exist with "Aunt Jamima frozen waffles" and "MS Magazine"(now with lingeries ads) share shelf space with "Playboy."
The economy is the collapso-meter for this society. Everything falls towards the center but the center cannot hold. America today is the safe haven for investors around a world made unsafe by American economic imperialism. Anarchy of production holds up this system against the production of anarchy. Corruption and Drug running are the most profitable businesses imaginable - until the rackets become so fat that busting them becomes a bigger business.
The newest Colombian government now promises a permanent drug war. How long until these new guys are on the take as well? To be uncorrupt today means merely that a boss aims for the top - he expects his price to be high. Like a great oozing blob, the drug\anti-drug monopoly expands to control all the monopolies that already buy and sell everyone's life in most parts of the world.
All the gangs that control images are being forced into the open now, are being forced to show themselves as gangs. Children's toys like G.I. Joe now brag about "fighting terrorism" instead of fighting enemy armies. The exploits of maiming and torturing villagers are no worse than the maiming roles set out by Barbie or the casualties of "conventional" warfare. What has changed is that bullying ("policing") is openly admired. Children's TV has an element of realism simply because the fight for a child's attention is now a fight for the hegemony of a monolithic product line. Atari versus Nintendo has the sweep, but not the drama, of Star Wars.
Corruption spirals; the more a corrupt boss feels threatened, the more he (or occasionally she) will take. Today, from Somoza and Marcos to the Lockeed and McDonnell Douglass, it's "take the money and run." Reagan accelerated the lying in the system just because the lies were starting to seem useless; the political-economy of the big lie is coming closer to a grand finale.
Today products must kill to show their differences. And killing gets extra publicity. Totalitarian Chic has a new urgency today. The carrier of the "Authentic Isreali Paratrooper Shoulder Bag" may be a bland engineer preparing for a career in death sciences or a real Isreali storm trooper over for a seminar on death sciences. The movie "Colors" inspired copy-cat gangs among whites or Samoans that commit real drive-by shootings. The crisis of ideology expands as Oliver North markets himself as a second-class cardboard hero using tales of going one-on-one with Abu Nidal.
We are not living a Germany, 1933. We live in an amalgam of different social repressions. While even the excitement promised by death worship is false, the new fascists are motivated as much by boredom as by the sexual repression that Wilhelm Reich documented. The "sexual revolution," as re-done by advertising, resulted in open sexuality with the humanity repressed; a cybernetic normalcy. Sex - as a commodity - can still be described as "male oriented genital consumption." Indeed, a few older women look back fondly to the days when sex was suppressed; like any illegal commodity, it was less covered by layers of publicity and regulation. Those few who discovered it by themselves at least had a chance to recreate it for themselves.
We race to get the most lies swallowed in the shortest period of time (are we losing to the Japanese?). America has been colonized many times (the suburbs are our strategic hamlets; prison camps of consumer satisfaction) but this factory society must always have another speed-up. It is no longer sufficient to show that you believe the lies. Capital's appetite is always larger. You must believe them faster and more sincerely than the next guy. Acting as an entrepreneur, you must anticipate the lies before they are made. Acting as a specialist, you must find the one lie you tell best and concentrate on it. From this we go to the slogan;"the key to success is to find a job that you enjoy!"
The economic crisis is so bad that there cannot be a recession. Stalin's methods have been grasped by the managers of the world's money markets. Economic growth is maintained at whatever cost and whatever deceptions. They must throw bad money after bad. The mass of capital, the money of the rich, must always grow. To have the economy shrink for any short period of time would immediately topple the controllers' image/guarantee of the future. Rather than paying the present deficit they would turn on each other like dogs and tear up the world. The April 17 crash showed this by threat - it was far larger than the crash of '29 but it merely threatened the alternatives and then proved that the government must and would use absolutely all resources at its disposal to support the market.
April 17 also showed how short term stock price changes are no longer signals of future behavior but instead show managerial purges and snafus (note how Ivan Boesky further profited by trading on the "privileged information" of his own indictment that sent stocks plummeting). In finance, industry, or government "some general must be killed to give the rest courage."
The present "growth period" simulates recession for most of the world's working class. By a hidden road, capitalism has returned home. It makes clear to the working class that "your loss is my gain." But like a tremendous glutton, every gain capitalism makes incites it to demand more from the working class.
The crisis of ideology materializes in the commodity coke; ideology maximally accelerated is shallow, violent and paranoid. The coke addict accumulates a deficit for the same reasons as the U.S. government. Here it is deficit of brain chemicals not money but the need to burn tomorrow for today is similar. With the system doomed to collapse, the only way out appears be to digging a hole to China. Money/The economy is worthless and so more and more must be spent. The coke addict must get more and more coke and so more and more money. The addict simply walks a little more quickly down the same path that MTV leads.
Even the image of the death drug is breaking into many pieces; Coke goes to Crack goes to Ice, which is smokable methamphetamine; speed in a Crack package. Ice is the newest of the advertised catastrophes. Somewhat less destructive but more long lasting, publicizing it keeps the hysteria mills going. Producing more products each year lets the genocide industry diversify.
After each explosion there must be a clear-up period. The Bechtel corporation today makes up its lost nuclear energy revenue with its nuclear clean-up money. "Contra-gate" was needed to officially tell us to forget. Horror and comedy sell about equally in theaters.
Disappearance is the most modern form of propaganda - from the death squads of South and Central America to the media disappearances initiated by Hollywood. "Double think" is a product of democracy and not totalitarianism. In keeping with the doctrine of privatizing, death squads produce a private, movable death camp. The automatic channel changer is advertised as the model of modern living. A button is pushed and the hag becomes a buxom, submissive, blonde; a switch is thrown and the homeless are removed.
The natural approach of the wounded is admiration for violent sport stars or Ramon Salcido. This society's violent perfection is provoking a violent reaction, an alchemy that is used by the process itself. The mechanics of this society are those of a supernova. Once the explosion ends, time for a final collapse. A complicated process decides how far this will go. Every time there is a drop in energy, people are drawn tighter together and the pressure increase. Every increase in pressure generates a new, but unpredictable amount of energy. The question is where we will end up; as a black whole, as a white dwarf or as a super nova.