By Donald Ceapach
Gonzo Town
July 30, 2011
Whether it was Bin Laden in his white robes and neatly trimmed beard, or Anders Breivik in his Knight Templar fancy dress and Masonic tunic, the consumers of mass media and ‘no alternative’ politics are shown what it’s really all about: God, the World and the Devil. Welcome to Morality Play 2011.
Their media manipulators and political handlers produce this bizarre compilation, and its macabre slayings on a production line basis with one single goal: reinforce social cohesion and political support for what are called “middle class values”.
This single goal of herding the middle class together and reinforcing its will to continue the No Alternative train ride to nowhere, of course, requires heroic and constant struggle by the leadership class. This class has the task of maintaining the “squeaky clean” growth economy in place, which safeguards the sacred middle class right to always consume more. As a side dish, the ruling class and their media provide a constant mixture of frenetic pseudo-events as an overlay to hide the total inertia… and moral void that the petit bourgeois are supposed to adore, calling it “stability”.
Ensuring that the mentally fragile middle classes are at all times comforted with the illusion that everything is under control, their minders and handlers deliver them medieval-style Morality plays where the Forces of Good are confronted by Evil. To be sure these need lashings of gore AKA Designer Killings.
For the ruling classes things are very simple: their vassals and serfs – the middle classes – are simply an illiterate and mindless mass which must be manipulated by the simplest of images, garish and bizarre costumes, and regular mass killings.
For the ruling elites, there is no point at all in trying to reason with this greedy and mindless rabble: the blahblah of education and democracy provides the illusion and the Internet is the Magic Lantern to keep them stupid.
THE “NO ALTERNATIVE”
The ruling elite’s one-only “political model” is strictly No Alternative. It was defined decades ago, trumpeted at the microphone in hundreds of two-minute “landmark speeches” during the early 1980s, by the iconic Emperor and Empress symbols of Neoliberal values: Mrs Thatcher of the UK and Ronald Reagan of the USA.
Very important however, this political model, its economic doctrine and even its so-called values are only hazily and lazily defined, even more so today than 30 years ago. The game started fuzzy, and is now completely smothered in mind fog.
Even the target audience, the middle class herd of Happy Consumers, is out of focus, far more so today than when the Neoliberal Emperor and Empress strode the world stage and filled TV screens with their pathetic, trashy and hysterical speeches. It is in fact very hard to define what “middle class post-industrial” might mean, because this class or group of persons avidly consumes every conceivable and imaginable type of industrial good and industrial service, but with its “values” things are hyper-clear.
These “values” are greed, waste, personal ego-tripping, useless consumption and cynical disinterest in the sufferings of other persons. Almost unlimited hypocrisy is also needed for these “post-industrial consumers” to execute their supposed mission of transforming the natural environment into a sterile Wasteland, and rain death and destruction and misery on selected smaller victim countries, inhabited by inferior races with inferior creeds whose children can be slaughtered – for nothing.
The current and rapidly changing version of this “foreign policy” of the Neoliberals, executed to thrill and to reassure their middle class voters is by committing war crimes on a production line basis, without a shred of guilt, but with Nazi-type Bully Boy pride. Called the War on Terror, this “foreign policy” of the Nazi-minded handlers and minders of the voting and consuming middle classes who keep the evil party going, one more day, is now falling apart on stage in full public view.
Marxism, socialism and multi-culturalism, thanks to Andrew Breivik (or whatever you want to call him – Agent X better fits the downmarket video game format), are now almost respectable. Conversely extreme right wing racism and anti-Islamic “values” are no longer the flavour of the day. The times they are a’changing!
LOSS OF INNOCENCE
The gnawing existential crisis of the “post-industrial middle classes” can never be completely hidden. As explained by many economists, starting with Marx and Engels, and also explained by psychologists and sociologists starting with Freud and Durkheim, the usefulness of a parasitic class sandwiched between low paid factory workers – producing the fodder consumed by the middle classes – and the ruling classes possessing the capital to produce, is not especially high and certainly not critical.
In emergency conditions, the petit bourgeois can be suppressed and the industrial party will still keep going.
Their role is only that of a social filter and spacer joint in the social pyramid: they sit on top of the workers who they despise, and adore the ruling elite that sit on top of them. Their usefulness is low, but whenever this gets too clear – at times of economic and monetary crisis exactly like the early 1980s and exactly like 2011 – they will become so fragile and flaky that Heroic Things are needed to bring them back under control.
In the economic crisis condition of the 1930s, in Italy and Germany, the petit bourgeois went right out of control and completely took over society – in the shape of Mussolini and Hitler. Middle class “values” were at that time on full and open display, not hidden by fancy symbols and twittering causes, like bottle recycling, using a bike or protecting polar bears.
The macabre and bloody, as well as laughably incompetent morality plays we are subjected to, with protagonists from Bin Laden to Anders B. (Agent X), are designed both to titillate with blood and gore, and to keep the petit bourgeois under control. Hidden in the decor, perhaps not evident at first glance, the “storyline” of these modern morality plays is simple: Man, the average petit bourgeois consumer, begins in pure innocence (in essence, greed), but is subject to the temptation of Wrong Ideas (for example sharing and caring) and Man will fall unless He repents, with the aid of Saviours.
The Saviours, as if you didn’t guess, are our Great Leaders and their anti-terror experts, fly-by-night financial charlatans, and any quick-buck business magnate smiling out of the trashy tabloid newspapers you find in the gutter. The tacky morality play enacted day and night in the media doesn’t come cheap, it costs billions of dollars and employs tens of thousands of persons, like the Soviet propaganda machine or any other State propaganda system propping up any other totalitarian or fascist regime. Which… can only fail, and will only fail.
The Modern morality play, like its medieval model, centers its action on The Struggle of Man Against a Variety of Sins.
Until Norway’s Agent X, these were dredged from early Christian and even pagan myths, dosed with Holy War crusader venom of the type that Knights Templar – in real life – gave vent to during the 200-year Holy Crusades – with not even a single barrel of oil to steal and pillage ! Today, this grisly pantomime charade has reached a critical stage of total incoherence. It is totally dysfunctional as is shown by the “middle classes” no longer believing that the Villains are real, and their supposed Call to Sin is so laughably strange, so ridiculous that they lose even more respect for the class they are programmed to respect, their Great Leaders, business magnates, football grunts, people personalities and all the other Tinsel Heroes who made a quick buck, by any means, and particularly through fraud, corruption, violence and theft.
CURTAINS DOWN ON THE MORALITY PLAY
The morality play was a genre of 15th and 16th century European Medieval entertainment, and even in its day they were known as “interludes”, marking the point that these dramas did not necessarily have a clear, unambiguous moral theme, especially so as the genre advanced in historical time, before completely disappearing by around 1600. Reasons for this included an already more complex society – not everybody being able to be lumped into distinct classes with fixed values. Even at the time, it wasn’t sure and certain that everybody was brain-dead! Through the period of our Modern Morality plays, only starting in the late 1990s and already finished today, at most 15 years later, they have gone through all stages of the wipe-out curve that took 200 years for their medieval lookalikes.
To be sure, for our openly degenerate ruling elites, or so-called elites mouthing tacky slogans at the microphone it is comforting to imagine the “middle classes” still exist, just like they did in the times of Emperor Reagan and Empress Thatcher, but sadly for them this is not so.
The middle classes, whatever they might be, have been stuffed with every conceivable consumer product and service for decades – it is normal they should regurgitate and vomit this toxic feast. It is normal they should Lose Faith – the most basic goal of the morality play being to prevent that. Their so-called “growth economy”, as they know, is a pathetic charade unable even to employ their children or older persons, ransacks and destroys the environment and is threatened daily by with near-instant implosion through the debt crisis their ruling elites have casually, and with total incompetence allowed to become hyper-critical.
Why should they believe in petit bourgeois Morality of the early 1980s vintage? The now poised to disappear modern morality play, where Heroic Defenders of the middle class cause, it “values”, are confronted by the Devil personified by Bin Laden or Agent X, or maybe Kaptain Krunch, or any other protagonists of Bad Attitudes is as dysfunctional and out of time as the ruling elites who ordered it.
To be sure, it is nice to choose a godly life over one of evil, but if being “middle class” means destroying the environment, waging war on poor countries ‘over the horizon’ and denying your own children a job, these Shining Ideals are no shinier than turds in a WC pan. The middle classes can understand that.
Soldiering on and muddling through, the “No Alternative” credo of our ruling elites will likely continue to produce designer False Flag killings of the Norway type, because they have No Alternative. These outrages are ordered and organized by the same criminals whom the middle classes troop out to vote for “because there is No Alternative”. But their credibility has dissolved to nothing.
The petit bourgeois of the white-dominated former-Christian post-industrial, mature urban democracies- or whatever they are called, now have much more serious things to worry about.
The times they are a ‘changing!