Fringeocracy: The End Of Democracy

It was good while it lasted. It may have even advanced the cause of life on earth, though jury is still out on that one. Sure enough, monarchy and absolute imperialism had worn out their welcome - had they ever been welcomed. So when democracy’s power-sharing became a thing, the world rejoiced. There were head-severing parties everywhere, with the shrilling sound of falling guillotines heard around the world. It was one small step for founding fathers, one giant leap for political parties. Or in the case of the ones that merely put lipstick on a pig, political PARTY (singular). Unfortunately for the dolled-up pig, natural selection is not on its side. If they haven’t figured it out by now, there’s no future in evolution for China’s and Russia’s leadership charade. But I will give Snowball Jinping and Napoleon Putin this much: they have altogether bypassed fringeocracy, the terminal cancer of democracy.

Maybe China and Russia always knew something we didn’t. It’s as if they sensed our world was nowhere near ready for a government by the people. I mean, is that a joke? Have we ever stopped to take a good look at “the people”? Sure, there’s a functional middle class in there, somewhere. But that’s not your critical mass. Count your dysfunctional middle class, the bulk of your blue collar, and your borderline poor, never mind your completely disenfranchised, and you’re just now beginning to comprehend  the magnitude of the fringes. Without judging, we’re talking about millions with asphyxiating cash flow, debt-preyed finances, roller-coaster depression, touch-and-go mental illness, troll-infested information sources, rage-distorted critical thinking, dysfunctional addictions, and high levels of gullibility. But, go on, tell us how the people can tell a leader from a grifter?

Democracy as it was intended has been taken hostage by the right and left fringes for too many generations. The mighty checks and balances have been brought to their knees. Entitlement consumes both fringes in an almost perfect symmetry.

To the left fringe, things should be “free”, a God-given right. They use the word without any shame in what they are saying.

To the right fringe, predatory practices are a simple matter of natural selection, a God-given endowment. They have no conscience over their actions.

To the left fringe, empathy is devoid of accountability. As such it is a token empathy, ultimately useless. It becomes an enabler and perpetuator of suffering.

To the right fringe, “freedom” is devoid of accountability. It is code for doing whatever the hell one wants to do, including not paying taxes, hiding behind bankruptcy, idolizing mass-assault weapons without any ownership of consequences.

Life on earth cannot, will not be taken hostage by these fringes. If democracy cannot control its fringes, it is useless to evolution. Like monarchies and imperialism before it, it’s time to retire it. What comes next is not “a return” to anything. It is not free anything. It is not oligarchic power sharing. It is the consolidation of power. It is the end of rich entitlement, of poor entitlement, and the dawn of accountable empathy.

Making Football Great Again

If memory serves me right, most Americans used the term “AMERICAN Football” more regularly decades ago. It seems like the “American” part of the name was gradually dropped over a generation or two, especially as the word soccer was adopted for that "other" football game. In spite of the increased Major League Soccer (MLS) popularity in the US these days, it’s not going to be easy for soccer to regain its real name in the US anytime soon (especially if it continues to be called Major League SOCCER). But I guess it’s one battle at a time on the road to greatness.

For all the technology applied in sports today, logic can play a sketchy part here in the US. There is hardly any “foot” in American football, but sure. Let’s call it football. And then there’s the “World” Series... don’t get me started  on that one. Anyway, I love the fact that fútbol / fußball is evolving into the American mainstream... slowly but surely.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of goofiness in “soccer”. The theatrics really need to stop, I say drag their asses off the field by their nuts when it’s an obvious fake (please watch Ozzy Man Reviews on soccer “dives”, truly priceless). And yes, a scoreless match should not be rewarded with a “draw”. Off to the penalties shootout for the lot of you. But don’t forget: last Super Bowl’s final score was the equivalent of a 1-0 soccer score: there was only one touchdown in the entire game. So a touchdown is six points plus a practically guaranteed extra point, for a total of seven? Adorable, but why not thirty four plus a practically guaranteed twelve for the PAT?

By the way, for those of you that live in a mutually exclusive world, it is possible to appreciate both sports. I’m a football (soccer) AND American football fan myself. Even if I’ve been condemned to deal with the ownership of the Cincinnati Bengals. Yes, I happen to be a Bengals fan, though I refuse to give any money to the current passionless franchise owner.

Speaking of money, what cracks me up is the TV broadcasts of soccer in the US. I don’t know how Americans, especially the broadcasters, are going to deal with the soccer culture of not showing commercials for 45+ minutes... Good lord, it’s like you’re asking them to hold their breath for 45 minutes.

Here’s the thing about sports and commercials. Besides American football I happen to be a basketball fan as well. But have you ever tried watching the last five minutes of the game on TV? For the love of Tostitos, I don’t know how many commercials I can stomach before I’ve forgotten what I was watching. Thank heavens for the Pepto-Bismol commercial or I would forget how to handle the previous barrage of junk food they sent my way.

Between basketball and American Football you have to think: these are supposed to be 48 to 60 minutes games, respectively. OK, add fifteen minutes of half times, but still: the average Sunday football game is a 3+ hours broadcast, for eleven minutes of action time (calculated by the Wall Street Journal a few years ago). ELEVEN MINUTES. For the love of life, I know people that have sex longer than that (or so they tell me).

Here’s a head-scratching excerpt from that WSJ article: “The average NFL broadcast spends more time on replays (17 minutes) than live play. The plurality of time (75 minutes) is spent watching players, coaches, and referees essentially loiter on the field. An average play in the NFL lasts just four seconds. Of course, watching football on TV is hardly just about the game; there are plenty of advertisements to show people, too. The average NFL game includes 20 commercial breaks containing more than 100 ads.”

Which of course, brings us to the mother of all commercials... you guessed it, the Super Bowl. Ask any red-blooded American and they’ll even admit it: “I don’t care about either team but I love watching the commercials!” Wow, now that’s an impressive accomplishment by our marketing boys & girls. Maybe we should just have six straight hours of commercials every Sunday, interrupted occasionally with score updates from real sport games.

But enough sarcasm, let me wrap up this sporting commentary on a positive note. When it comes to sports, what you grew up with as a kid and shared with your dad, mom, siblings, and friends... is priceless. I don’t care if it’s baseball, football, American football, basketball, hockey, tennis, rugby, or cricket... what unites all sporting games is passion. The thrill of victory, the agony of defeat. That’s what has always made sports great.

Take me out to the ball game

Take me out with the crowd

Buy me some peanuts and crackerjacks

I don't care if I never get back

Let me root, root, root

For the home team

If they don't win it's a shame

Aahh.

For it's one, two,

Three strikes you're out

At the old... ball... game!

There Goes The Neighborhood

Dear future generations: I’m not sure how you’re going to deal with this, but this is not the way it was supposed to work out. No, “we” didn’t start this fire. Some of us are still fighting for a better way, but this... nope. Not going to work out.

“Roscosmos”, “NASA”, “ESA”, “ISS”, those were small steps for humanity in the right direction. But this shitshow? Ouch. I don’t know who hurt the folks who voted these three-ring circus grifters into leadership, but the damage inflicted just keeps getting more surreal.

We were supposed to have figured this out by now. Obviously not... “Ownership”. “Exploitation”. Hey, here’s an awesome disruption for you: the sun! Our star, fuck yeah. Build a wall of spaceships around it, claim ownership and rights, exploit the hell out of that ball of gas. Build pipelines, tap the shit out of it. The moon? The moon is for losers. He who mines the sun will own the entire solar system.

So this is how natural selection in the universe works. Huh. From our lack of contact it’s getting to be painfully clear that those who figure life out are well served by steering the hell clear from us. Two types of life in the universe: those who figure it out, and three-ring circus grifters.

The Immigrants

"Brothers can you spare some room?"

There are two kinds of immigrants: point-to-point and Gypsy. The P2P immigrant - you know the one, my grandfather came to New York from Sicily, or my lawn guy came from Mexico City to Houston - is the more historically understood. It is also equally romanticized and vilified. Dig deep enough and everyone finds a P2P immigrant in their ancestry. At an almost perfectly Iinear correlation, the farther back people dig the more romantic it gets. Your immigrant ancestors were good, hardworking people. Factory workers by day, wholesome family patriarchs and matriarchs by night. To the faithful we are all children of the biblically larger-than-life Adam & Eve (peculiarly white in most visual interpretations, but I digress). To the empirical we are all children of stardust.

The Gypsy is mostly vilified. Human tolerance for the un-rooted is limited. Mistrust sets in, and it is almost impossible to eradicate. Ironic, since the gypsy does not stick around long enough to entertain the fears of the rooted ones. 

There is a third kind of immigrant, deserving of mention and respect, the Forced Immigrant. But for the purpose of this conversation let’s focus on immigrants who technically had a choice, regardless of consequences. In theory, we can consider the Forced Immigrant a branch of the P2P. Migrant workers or corporate globetrotters can be a subset of the Gypsy, but if they keep going back to their point of origin, or end up there, they are technically not immigrants. A peculiar hybrid are Gypsies that eventually pick a place and plant roots there for the rest of their lives. Gypsy-to-P2P crossovers, if you will.

“Nation of Immigrants” is simplistic political pandering. We are a migrating planet, never mind nations. We are on a rock that is hurling through universal space at a resulting speed of approximately one million miles per hour. Let me unpack it this way: at that speed the entire human race is gypsying through the equivalent of seventeen countries per minute. Hyper-movement is not an option, it is the de facto autopilot of life.

The absurdity of immigration perceptions can be illustrated by simple examples. A man living in Toronto, Canada who drives an hour and a half to Buffalo, New York is a Canadian immigrant. But wait, it gets better: a woman who moves five blocks, from Ciudad Juarez to El Paso is a Mexican immigrant. Meanwhile a family can move 5,823 miles from Kure Atoll, Hawaii, to Riviera Beach, Florida and not be an immigrant. To be clear: that distance is roughly a quarter of the earth’s circumference. Way farther than any Italian immigrant to New York travelled.

This level of absurdity was not lost on Europeans. Against much greater odds than the average heartland American can comprehend, Europe opened its borders within a lifetime to twenty-eight nations, with almost as many cultures and languages. “For Czech, press 24...”  But it’s not just about arbitrary borders and physical proximities, is it. It’s also about those elusive jobs, beliefs, customs, rituals, habits, languages, looks and smells.

Pragmatic realism sets in. The EU and the US have been experiencing sympathetic pains since the traumatic events that took place between 1993 and 2001. The earlier event (1993) was the year the European Single Market was born. It rose from the ashes of two World Wars and one Cold War, in the name of “four freedoms”: movement of goods, services, money, and people. As it turned out, the union had to settle for three out of four freedoms. That free movement of people thing has not worked out so well, creating a seismic social shift to the far right all across Europe. As for the latter event (2001), it was one infamous September morn in America that almost broke the needle for Americans, slamming it to the far right. 

Enter Sandman. We talk a big game about “the almighty buck” in America, but we should really consider quitting the charade. The prime directive of our lives is, and always has been, the almighty fear. Fear rules the world, not money. Money is just what most people believe will make the fear go away. In the words of the fearsome Skar,  follow me, and you’ll never go hungry again! Money buys you a personality, so that you’ll never be lonely again. Money, regardless of how it’s obtained, will buy the adulation of millions for someone who will make you great again. 

In every family’s lineage there was once an immigrant who was feared. Who was persecuted. Who was hated. Not recognizing this basic scar of life constitutes a fear, hatred, and persecution of your own kind. 

In the meantime, should you choose to refute that premise, let’s join hands and recite the Purebred’s Creed - shall we?

Immigrants steal jobs.

Immigrants rape.

Immigrants sell drugs.

Immigrants murder.

Immigrants will hurt your children.

Immigrants create “no-go zones”.

Immigrants are dirty.

Immigrants will take Christmas away.

Vote for me, Sandman. 

I alone can make the immigrants go away.

...

“Hush little baby don't say a word

And never mind that noise you heard

It's just the beasts under your bed

In your closet in your head

Exit light

Enter night

Grain of sand”

-Metallica, “Enter Sandman”