Centered

Greetings good citizen,

The markets closed up a tiny bit today; proving nothing that yesterday’s market didn’t already tell us, which is pretty much nothing.

Why bring it up? No good reason I guess. Just something to do while we’re waiting for the worms to come.

Which brings us to the ‘bad news’…

Tonight’s offering is another ‘meta’ piece on a subject that I can’t remember if I’ve already shot my mouth off about before. I’m not about to sift through three years worth of blog posts to figure it out either. As close as I can recall, it is one of those things I meant to write about but then I changed my mind and wrote about something else instead.

Um, there’s a fine line between ‘piquing someone’s interest’ and boring them to death…and I fear I’m on the verge of the latter.

What is ‘Goober’ going to waste your time with now?

Well, I was listening to NPR this afternoon and one the talking heads started into a diatribe about the fucking ‘center’…and I damn near lost it because where the center actually is and where these clowns pretend it is are two separate animals.

Um, this is sort of ‘typical’ because the whole story is actually kind of amusing, in that sick way that most conservative philosophies need you to be a little twisted to comprehend them.

There was a ‘political cartoon’ in the opinion section of one of NPR’s websites for one of their shows…the cartoon has been there for 2 months…and, as you might expect, the conservatives remained blissfully ignorant of it for a solid month and a half. The cartoon, actually it’s an animation so it’s a little more ‘graphic’ than a comic sketch with word balloons.

Um, anyway…the cartoon is titled ‘How to speak ‘teabag’’

Since this um ‘ridicules’ the conservative mentality…(such as it is) the conservative ‘community’ started an uproar over, you guessed it, their ‘tax dollars’ being used to fund this kind of, er, humor.

Believe me when I tell you good citizen, the conservatives are ‘outraged’, simply outraged that tax dollars are being ‘frittered away’ in this fashion.

I speak from experience when I say that NPR pays peanuts…you don’t create for them because you’re looking for a payday, you do it because you believe.

I guess what I’m trying to say is it went completely unnoticed for the first 6 weeks because of the well-established conservative, um, ‘aversion’ to exposing themselves to conflicting points of view.

Even Rush insists you have to listen to him for six weeks until you’re ‘de-programmed’ enough to begin accepting the ‘truth’…

But I’m drifting off track.

Where do you suppose we would have to go to find, er, ‘neutral’ territory? The theoretical ‘center’ of the political spectrum…does anyone have a clue?

I’m going to tell you right here and now that the center is a lot further to the left than most of you have been lead to believe.

Most of you have been taught that our ‘Fabian Democracy’ is a ‘left of center’ construct, something I vehemently deny because democracy as it is currently practiced removes you completely from the decision making process.

You only get to make one decision and after it’s made you remain out of the loop, completely out of touch with whatever is done in your name.

This, I don’t need to tell you, is no a ‘left of center’ construct but a right of center construct! Understand that the left doesn’t trust the government and the right doesn’t trust the people!

With that as a given, just where is this ‘center’ they keep talking about?

Perhaps we need to ‘simplify’ the sides a little more, we get a meaningful start when we go with the idea that the left is ‘people centric’ and the right is ‘power centric’ which is the same thing as saying they favor ‘rulers’ over justice.

These are the same freaks that supported monarchy (as long as they were favored by the ruling class.) These aren’t your ‘fellow citizens’, these are your ‘betters’, people who would have you clapped in irons and stripped of your holdings if you dared to stand up for your rights…and if you stood still and took it, so much the better as far as they were concerned!

And those ‘assholes’ haven’t ‘disappeared’; they’re still with us.

Um, sorry, where was I? Oh yeah, we were searching for the ‘center’, that neutral ground where everything is fair, square and on the level.

The left is interested in ‘fairness’ and the right is interested in power (for themselves, they fear others having power over them.)

So where is the middle? If you’re a ‘righty’ there’s no such thing! There are only those who have/wield power and those who don’t.

Not too ironically, this makes compromise damn near impossible!

The only possible compromise is one where nobody has power and this is ‘inconceivable’ to the conservative mind. Were they ever to find themselves in such a position, they would lead the charge to ‘fill the void’, even if none existed.

Um, sorry good citizen, I’m showing my own ‘prejudice’ here as I believe conservatism is the end result of centuries of bootlicking. Where a whole swath of humanity has become so accustomed to ‘leaching off of royalty’ that their minds are incapable of compromise, they would literally rather die than trust in an impartial, fair and just system.

Sadly, we are still no closer to finding the ‘center’. To accomplish that goal we have to make a very strange ‘assumption’, we’d have to ‘assume’ that people were rational and mentally competent enough to stand on their own two feet…then we can proceed.

Shazam! Now that we have magically eliminated those not mentally equipped to make decisions on their own, we can proceed with our exercise in finding the ‘center’ of the socio-political spectrum.

Note that I didn’t use ‘economic’ as one of our measures because ‘the center’ automatically assumes all participants are of ‘equal worth’, regardless of their economic circumstances.

So how many of our current ‘centrists’ actually belong there? I’d say we’ve wiped them out in one fell swoop, but that happens whenever you start looking at politicians and their ‘campaign war-chests.’

Does the center seek power for the sake of having power itself?

No, the center does not seek power, power is a tool that should never be used for personal gain…which effectively eliminates anyone not knocked out by the equality clause.

There is one more ‘metric’ that separates right from left and that is the definition of the ‘mission’ itself. Is the mission to assure the survival of the species or is the mission to hold on to power and advantage for as long as possible?

Where do you suppose that fits in our search for the ‘center’?

At issue here is the ‘purpose’ of government and I’m pretty sure most people would agree that our government has gone far beyond the scope of its intended mission. So there’s no ‘center’ to be found in that direction.

No irony should be lost on the fact that we establish governments to protect us from the machinations of the greedy...in light of recent events, I’d say the government, now more than 230 years old, has failed miserably.

Looks like I keep wandering off of the tracks but each of these pieces adds up to the larger whole.

We ‘should’ be moving towards the center, but that’s not happening.

The center isn’t ‘militaristic’ but it isn’t chicken either. The ‘right’ likes a strong military for the same reason it focuses so intensely on ‘law and order’, while being totally uninterested in ‘justice’.

For the right it’s not about ‘freedom’, it’s about suppressing dissent!

Most criminals were forced to commit their crimes by the, er, overzealous who criminalize normal acts just so they appear to be ‘tough on crime’.

Leaving an individual with no alternatives isn’t justice; it’s cruelty.

Looks like I have found out what happened to the first attempt to find the ‘center’, it’s not as simple a task as it seems.

That said, there seems to be a lot of hot air being expended by people who couldn’t find the damn center with both hands and an ICBM.

The middle ground is out there good citizen but nobody is particularly interested in finding it. Which leaves us with the conundrum of just who, exactly, are these so-called ‘centrists’ they keep babbling about?

If nothing else, this has been a rather enlightening exercise in examining the political spectrum. We gained a better understanding of the conservative mindset and what sets us apart.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner