I suppose when you know that an advertisement found on a billboard is meant to attract idiots, you might as well go low and pander to the lowest common denominator of stupid. This billboard down the street from us required an extra stop to capture just how dumb the public obviously is because who goes to Newport Beach, California, and gets on a boat to watch football?

I go to the ocean to be at the sea; we do not spend that kind of money to go watch TV; then again, we are the odd ones out, and we know it. Also odd, the model on the right was waving to someone in the original photo; you can see the incredibly poor Photoshopping of her arm, plus she’s looking to the right. [She also has kid’s legs but seems otherwise to be of comparable size to everyone else – Caroline] The guy in front of her is looking straight ahead, not at the TV, and the woman in front of him is looking left of the TV. I don’t believe any of the food was in the original image because who has a bowl of salad with three rolls on top of it placed in a position where tan sweater-man’s arm, should he let it down, would be resting in that salad? The TV is not casting a shadow from the sun that’s out in front of everyone; at least there are shadows from the models. What a crap composite, but I suppose driving by, nobody will concern themselves with those details. Heck, I didn’t see all that until I took the photo.

Hey marketing dolts, here’s an idea for you: advertise vacations in Hawaii featuring people acting like moles burrowing into the earth. This is free for whoever wants to take inspiration from my great idea; I claim no copyright to the brilliant concept.

There is no left, leftism, or radical left. The Zapatistas, Occupy Wall Street, and WTO protestors are all dead movements. The socialism scare is the orchestrated fear-mongering of a genius campaign to shift the world to the right. Wanna-be dictators might spew rhetoric about Deep State cabals, but the truly nefarious nature of our reality leaning into the far-right hate politics of the 21st century is happening right before our faces. The corporate, big money-backed television, radio, and social media personalities who extol a vitriolic diet of inflaming and bating angry, disenfranchised people afraid of the accelerated changes that have arrived with new communication media are happening right in front of our faces.

I am the left, some guy who wants to go with the flow as I adapt to the evolving circumstances of time going forward. I’m not afraid of young people, people of color, those who are exploring gender fluidity, or a land and culture that is transitioning into tomorrow. I am afraid of conformity, gross stupidity, those who don’t read, anger aimed at nebulous, non-existent boogymen who are creations of political jingoists, and those who feel an entitlement to anything at all.

The left is something America is so afraid of; there’s no chance of allowing anything other than a tiny fringe minority of leftists to even exist in this country. Not that they would be actively sought out and eliminated, but their fingerprints and traces are so easily monitored that their presence is always known and their influence mapped. Just how many people do you know who’ve read left-leaning anything? Aside from Marx and Engels, I’ll wager I could ask the next 1000 people I meet to name one left-leaning author, just one.

Tell me the title of one book from Michael Foucault, Alain Badiou, Edward Said, or Mark Fisher. How about the notorious Howard Zinn? Maybe you could tell me just a little something regarding anything they’ve written about? Didn’t Baudrillard, Deleuze, Derrida, and maybe even Nietzsche, for that matter, go on about socialist ideology? You wouldn’t know because leftist anything is a chimera dressed in the black clothes of someone protesting anti-fascism called Antifa.

There are no less than 11 million Americans who identify with Alt-Right ideologies, and right-wing hate groups have murdered nearly 400 people in 25 years; how many Antifa are there, and how many Americans have they killed?

If you believe there’s a woke ultra-left thing happening in America, it’s because you are afraid of things you’ve been taught to fear, such as being woke (alert to injustice in society, especially racism) or Critical Race Theory (“The Frankfurt School was a group of scholars known for developing critical theory and popularizing the dialectical method of learning by interrogating society’s contradictions.” – Nicki Lisa Cole, Ph.D.) I’m referencing critical theory here as, in my view, thinkers about racism have used this method to look at racism and inequality with the idea of learning more about society and improving our lives, but for the far-right, any look and criticism that might lead to cultural change are forbidden, so being “woke” or teaching “CRT” and the idea that addressing anything that deals with the white/black divide, gay/straight chasm, gender identity, or injuries that arise from various types of violence, any conversations that might be critical of the status quo puts at risk what it means to be American.

Don’t worry, people of the United States, all the important leftists in America that you’ve never heard of because there are no living, famous, important leftists here, would all fit on one Space-X rocket and could easily be blasted into orbit. The thing is, whoever might be on that very, very short list just wants everyone to get along and let others find a solid path to a fulfilling life.

The funny thing about the system moving even a hair to the left to what, in reality, is at best the center, one must first admit to being a fully-fledged socialist as though being thus credentialed is essential to claiming to be a lefty.

Being on the left, the real left is certainly an incredibly dangerous place to see a population heading to as it would imply a move towards freedom as defined by the individual and not by a state that tells its subjects which laws will work against them in order to contain them from thinking or acting on their own behalf.

So why is there even a left and a right? Because in the effort to maintain a state of dependence predicated on mass stupidity, reducing all things to either/or, with us/against us, winner/loser, gay/straight, and left/right, we are able to draw up quick sides of isolation, marginalization, and polarization. Nuances cannot be a part of the program as that injects too many options and demands self-responsibility, and that requires an education that eclipses everything we’ve done to diminish the importance of learning. We may pay cursory lip service to “learning,” but knowledge and wisdom are not areas we are striving to reach.

Image: Black bloc. (2022, September 12). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_bloc

Pioneers, inventors, wanderers, and people steeped in hard work helped define a nation in a previous age. Nowaday,s this has been supplanted by superficial caricatures of clowns that are themselves creations of illusions. While people are relics with little utility to a society that is possessed by fragmentary citizens honed from the trash of nostalgia and trivia.

Do not conflate nostalgia and trivia with real knowledge, as a grab bag of nonsense regarding sports, celebrities, viral videos, and video games hardly replaces literature, philosophy, science, and theology. Fashion belies the idea that someone’s external expression is somehow relevant to the advancement of our species. Yet, due to our utter lack of direction as people of the United States, we now rely on the appearance of things to wholly define one’s place in the natural order.

It is as though we’ve reversed our trajectory into the future, regressing to the age where one’s display of face paint, seashells, necklace of trophies, or types of animal skins worn proffer an adequate positioning of our standing in the social hierarchy.

Fractured media sources play into this by delivering fragments of nonsense construed as specific cultural knowledge but presenting us with superfluous trash masquerading as contemporary relevance. Do we as a society want more than that? The answer I see writ large on the foreheads of those I encounter is a resounding NO. We are seemingly happy to be lost in our trivialized compendium of all things golf, Pokemon, celebrity du jour, fad exercise, or scandal rocking the tabloids that we find trending on social or mass media.

The cliché that we are becoming a nation of idiots is played for laughs but actually applies to the vast majority – which do not realize this includes them. In my estimation (or arrogance), I believe this concerns almost 95% of those I am likely to encounter on any given day, week, or month. I move from poor to wealthy environments and rarely am able to claim to be witness to intellectual activity. Sure, I listen in on savvy investors making money, real estate deals, and people plotting their next vacation or sending their children off to university, but the underlying mindset is tone-deaf to matters of societal cohesion beyond obtuse biases that often fuel hate.

Without a working broad spectrum of knowledge and little logic backed by critical thinking, my fellow citizens wreak of posturing imbeciles while whatever hope I’ve had of finding inspiration and mentorship from those around me has faded like the sun over Seattle in January. How does one find community in a society of idiots when the ambitions of the individual are met with indifference to big-picture issues and sharing well-reasoned wisdom doesn’t exist? Instead of being embraced in the community, we are labeled nerds and geeks to be relegated to the margin as difficult while being perceived as awkward and or anti-social.

Somewhere along the road of advancement in the United States, knowledge became a weapon characterized by showing off and appearing arrogant. The economic reality of capitalism requires rewarding of smart, but it should happen off-camera on the margin and in the shadows. Should great success come your way, the scrutiny of who you are and the hope for your demise will run rife in our population of misfits who thrive on seeing others ultimately suffer worse fates than they perceive themselves to be suffering.

Somewhere in the back of my head, maybe in the front, sit Alan Watts, Terence McKenna, Nietzsche, Baudrillard, Baudelaire, Bukowski, Burroughs, Dickens, Ram Dass, Russell, Dawkins, Deutsch, E.O. Wilson, Fortey, Foucault, Reich, Canetti, Marcuse, and Bataille. They inform my search for a voice.

500,000 years ago, we started making stone tools; 30,000 years ago, we learned to work with clay; 12,000 years ago, we learned how to farm; 10,0000 years ago, we learned to work with copper; and 6,000 years ago, we learned how to work with bronze. Today, we are reduced to social media and empty posturing so that a new religion called consumption and conspicuous display can rule over us. The digital tools we are using are the new religious icons that adorn our minds, occupying them with thoughts of our electronic Jesus, Buddha, etc.

We stand on the knife’s edge before the maw of the beast, its fangs bared, our future uncertain. After thousands, tens of thousands of years of evolving survival skills combined with cultural and scientific advancements, we are led by frightened greedy men drunk on treasure, fearful of one another, and ready to do battle with demons of extradimensional ferocity. Yet, it is only us standing on the horizon, alone with our existential angst and personal neglect of a personal healthy ecosystem of mind, that rages before humanity.

Without wandering hordes of enemies, without wild beasties ready to spring from the night to seize our throats in their jaws, we empower our fellow men to reign with deadly force and allow the madness of unchecked individuals to harness chaos among us to ensure we must live in uncertainty believing horror is just ahead. As we attempt to progress, it is our destruction of the resources of our planet, the potential for profound and abrupt cessation of lives due to mass illness, or political dogma painted in zealotry doing the bidding of jingoistic narcissists that trace back to the most privileged enjoying the high altitude life that survives atop the feeding chain of the haves and the have-nots.

Knowledge and wisdom from our elders were erased over the past century, and rightfully so, as we intentionally dumbed down our populations so that only a small cadre of sadistic opportunists could share power among themselves. We as individuals no longer know how to govern ourselves, our ability to voice our minds without resorting to violence or equally stupid rhetoric has been placed on the sideline, and thoughts of the future have been replaced with hope for survival in a world that if it was managed by wisdom would have few enemies other than those of our own making.

A solution will not be easily had as wealth and power are cowardly fellows and fully understand what could be lost if an angry, undereducated mob was unleashed with the knowledge that they are but frightened tools manufactured by the powers that be who once believed that a stupid society is a passive controllable mass of consumption, profit, and warfare that remains ripe for exploitation while ignorant of what they’ve sacrificed by not investing in themselves.

Roe v. Wade was overturned today because conservative religious zealots have penetrated the Supreme Court. As a consequence, sunlight over America is fading while the blood of women will pour out.

The news about fuel costs, the endless lament, a conversation of extraordinary whining regarding the insane expense of filling a tank, this nonsense must stop because who really cares?

When gas costs $3.50 a gallon (such as back during this past January), the natives rest easy, but at $5.40 a gallon (current price as of today in Arizona), we have a national emergency. Give me a break. How can this panic be real when reality says this is NOTHING unless one considers it a distraction? The average roundtrip to and from work in the United States appears to be about 41 miles per day. The average fuel economy across America right now is a hair under 25 miles per gallon.

Using those numbers requires 1.64 gallons of gasoline for the daily commute. So, back in January, it cost approximately $5.75 to get to and from work, while today, it now costs $8.86 or $3.10 more per day than it did back at the beginning of the year.

By land area, Phoenix, Arizona, is the 6th largest city in the continental United States. A ridiculous commute from the north edge of the Phoenix area in Carefree south to the border of the Gila River Indian Reservation in south Chandler would amount to 43 miles in each direction or 86 miles roundtrip. For this long haul, you’d be spending $18.58 per day with gas at $5.40 per gallon unless you drove my 2019 Kia Niro hybrid, in which case it would be a $9.29 outlay.

My point is that very few people can lay claim to 100-mile-per-day commutes, even here in America’s 6th largest city, and if they are doing that using some large pickup truck, that’s an error in judgment, and besides, only 15% of pickups are used for work so please don’t toss that red herring at me.

For those who earn on the low end of the pay scale, sure, this hurts them, but not as much as higher rents do, and NOBODY is talking about that.

So let’s venture into the low-pay situation; someone I know works about 9 miles away from the coffee shop she works at. Her 2001 Jeep Cherokee, on a good day, gets 17 miles per gallon; so back in January, she was spending $3.50 to get to and from work, while today it’s approaching $5.50, and there are those who are trying to argue that this extra $2.00 is the straw that is breaking the camel’s back. If she works 22 days per month, she’s incurring an extra expense of $44 due to today’s cost of gas, but her rent increased by $300 a month, just as ours did. Yet the government has the audacity to call for a gas tax holiday that only adds $0.18 per gallon., I wonder what someone like this woman would do with the extra $5.40 per month she’d be saving? Oh, I know, she’d apply it to her rent.

The 2022 median wage in America is $16.50 per hour or $13.90 after tax. The national median price for a one-bedroom apartment was $1,216 back in 2019, meaning someone needed to earn $21 an hour back then to afford a small apartment, but instead of discussing wage inequality, we blame greedy oil companies and lay fault at the gas pump as being the boogyman ruining our ability to afford life. What a sham.