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What Castle Walls Do
By David Glenn Cox
There’s a foxfire moon out tonight with swift-moving, wispy clouds that turn the moon a sorrowful pale blue then gray. Then it winks out and then returns to repeat its Crayola color scheme. As I ponder the permanence of the moon's cycle I ask myself how long can this earthly pretending go on?
If I read that “payrolls in the U.S. jumped by 162,000 last month” one more time I’m going to scream! I know 48,000 of those jobs were temporary jobs as census takers and they know that too but still they underline it with silver and gold. Then to bolster their claim that all is well and that it’s safe to walk past the graveyard at midnight they add this one: “The U.S. economy expanded at a 3.2 percent annual rate in the first quarter as households spent more freely.”
Let’s see, what is it that employed Americans have until April 15th to do each year? The IRS sends out 100 million tax refunds checks averaging $2,000, but oh yes, the economy is recovering because it created 162,000 jobs last month. Falsehoods, fallacies and media felicio, how can they lie to us so? Practice, I imagine, lots of practice, like a good dog taught to dance for its treat and to bark on command.
Life does not owe you a living. No, of course not, that’s not life’s job. Life is the arena in which we all perform; it is a cauldron of humanity and a jungle of barbarity. It's a foolish, idle notion to think that life owes us anything except life itself. It is through hundreds of thousands of years of carnage, blood and torments that mankind rose up from the primordial ooze to create the trappings of government and the vestiges of civilization.
Leaning heavily on the big mumbo jumbo or grand high Juju we are trained to love one another while we pierce the hearts of those who have neither learned our grace nor live in our holy light. This is our three-legged milking stool, the big mumbo jumbo, government and humanity. So while life owes you nothing and the big mumbo jumbo smiles down upon your misery there by fulfilling his obligations, government and humanity do owe you a living.
The grand castles of England, Ireland and Wales were built to aggrandize their liege lords but also to protect the peasants and clergy from marauding Vikings. That was their liege lord’s purpose in life, to protect the society from calamities and barbarities, and failing to do so would sleep with their head resting peacefully upon a pike or comfortably numb in a guillotine basket. It was Pharaoh’s job to keep the granaries full in case of famine and Caesar's job to keep the hungry of Rome fed. That was their job; Caesar didn't feed the hungry because he was a liberal or a conservative or just wanted to be thought of as a great guy.
Without food and shelter the peasants revolt; that is their job. It's a governmental yin and yang that we seem to have lost sight of. Civilization is a voluntary agreement and when government abrogates its part of the bargain it is the citizenry’s job to remind them through petition or sword just what the rightful alternative actually is. Astronauts travel through space safe and warm with plenty of food and oxygen while peering out the window into the vacuum of space with its absolute zero temperatures or heat that would boil the blood. But like our political class, they see it but don’t understand it. They see themselves as masters of space when they are prisoners of their own space ships.
April 29 (Bloomberg) -- "Since the U.S. recession began in December 2007, Congress has extended the length of unemployment benefits for the jobless three times. Now, the lawmakers may have reached their limit. They are quietly drawing the line at 99 weeks of aid, a mark that hundreds of thousands of Americans have already reached. In coming months, the number of those who will receive their final government check is projected to top 1 million.”
“Good news, Sire, we’ve found a cure for unemployment! We’ve just told them all to go away!”
“You can’t go on forever,” said Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus. “I think 99 weeks is sufficient.”
“There’s just been no discussion to go beyond that,” said Senator Byron Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat.”
They fail to realize that it is not the unemployed who have failed but government which has failed. They see the problem and the blame as being upon the unemployed themselves, blaming the rape victim for walking seductively. Our mighty Bhagwan has offered up tax credits to employers to spur employment. It is a national policy that says, “You do it, somebody do it, but I’m not going to do it.”
It's like Pharaoh or Caesar offering tax credits for someone else to feed the poor, but from the Marie Antoinette wing of the Republican Party we have Representative John Linder. “We have study after study that shows people are more anxious to get a job after they run out of benefits, and continuing to extend this isn’t helping them or us.”
Can you buy a pike at Ace Hardware these days? That comment is below contemptible; we are talking about American families, women with small children. If this was just a case of some self-impressed political potentate in a pressure suit it would be enough to check the back issues of Popular Mechanics for do-it-yourself guillotine plans.
But it actually has a darker purpose, to try and make the Bhagwan look bad before the November elections, as if he needs help. It's a political ploy involving millions of struggling Americans to deceive the other millions of Americans into a false paradigm of fiscal conservatism that is more akin to ritual sacrifice. So let us be done forever with arguments of what evils our government would or wouldn’t do in our name or for their own gain. They will use the poverty and suffering of millions as an election ploy, but the Bhagwan party won’t take the bait and will just ignore the issue altogether.
So 400,000 unemployed Americans will stop receiving benefits each and every month. When you read that unemployment held steady it is a lie. When you stop receiving benefits you also stop being counted as unemployed. They fall to the pitiless Earth without a heat shield to burn up in the pyres of American capitalism. They cease to exist or to be treated as real people anymore.
Baucus said extension legislation would fail in the Senate because of both the deficit and the negative "atmospherics" of lengthening the weeks of aid into triple digits.
“The best thing to do is get this economy turned around” to create jobs, said Baucus.
And meanwhile the families will live where? And they will keep the lights on with what?
It matters not what the mighty legions do to defend the empire’s boundaries if the emperor cannot feed the throngs in the streets. Government and humanity have no higher obligation and even if the great Juju can be placated, conscience and the illusion of civilization cannot be. Castle walls have but two functions, to protect the citizens from invaders and as the final resting places of failed governments. It has always been so under the burning sun and sorrowful pale moon.
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