EDWARD CLINE: GENERATION “I” FOR IDIOT
http://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2015/07/generation-i-for-idiot.html
A little past midway through the second season of House of Cards, Episode 1, Chapter 14, Frank Underwood, ambitious politician and murderer, throws Zoe Barnes, the sluttish, amoral reporter who helped him move closer to the Vice Presidency and finally the Presidency with her stories calculated to smear or destroy his rivals, not so much under the bus, as under an incoming DC Metro train. He does this just after persuading her to erase all evidence of contact with him from her iPhone. Barnes was also Underwood’s sometime mistress.
Earlier in the series, he tells a co-conspirator, Remy Danton, a former employee and now a weight-throwing lobbyist for an “evil” natural gas giant, that he disposes of people he is finished using if they threaten his climb up the political “food chain.” A while later, Freddy, the ribs specialist, tells him that his new ribs supplier uses what I recognized from his disapproving description of it as a version of the Muslim halal way of killing animals – letting them bleed to death first – instead of killing them quickly and cleanly. Freddy’s new supplier instead shoves a pipe down a pig’s throat.
“The humane way to do it is to make it quick. Bring out a bucket of slop like it’s feedin’ time, then Bam! Shovel right to the base of the head. No screamin’.”
This gives Frank Underwood, played by Kevin Spacey, an idea of how to immediately and permanently dispose of Zoe Barnes, who now poses a threat to his plans to occupy the Oval Office. This harks back to the very first observation Underwood makes in his debut scene in the series, when he breaks the neck of a dog that has been hit by a car (he pretends to its owners that the car killed it).
“There are two kinds of pain. The sort of pain that makes you strong, or useless pain. The sort of pain that’s only suffering. I have no patience for useless things.”
The “bucket of slop” for Barnes is Underwood’s promise of a renewed alliance with him. It is the trap Underwood sets for the reporter, whom he suspects is also secretly working to expose him as the murderer of Peter Russo, a Congressman Underwood was manipulating but lost control of.
That is more or less how Obama, the Democrats, and even the Republicans, dispose of their various electorates and voting blocs. In spite of all the free cellphones and ObamaCare and other collectivist social legislation engineered or endorsed by Obama and Pelosi and Harry Reid and their ilk, they never really had their itinerant “constituents” best (or worst) interests in mind. They’ll deliver less than promised or nothing at all. And yet, like village idiots – idiots bred and raised in Hillary’s village – those constituents remain loyal and clueless.
Jonathan Henderson, in his July 25th Politchicks article, “America’s Hippies Sired a Posterity of Idiots,” lamented:
More than a quarter-century since the fall of the Berlin Wall, any hope for a hundred flowers to bloom now reek of Mao Zedong’s deathly stench akin to China’s Cultural Revolution. Not one lesson was learned, except a far worse account of rehashed “-isms” which include communism, National Socialism, the
Islamic world’s final push for a global caliphate and corporatism.
Now, the cultural decay sees my former students believing Babe Ruth broke the color barrier in baseball while other have never heard of the Beatles. But when one student in a U.S. History course did not know Barack Obama was president of the United States, the great fear I prayed would never arise was confirmed when the blissfully-ignorant, doomed kid immediately returned to his iPhone.
Yes. America truly has raised a generation of idiots. Technology finally surpassed mankind’s common sense.
Technological advances are supposed to be labor-saving in nature. They were never intended to preempt the necessity of mental labor, of thought, of cogitation. Common sense? It isn’t as common as one might imagine. It never was. Common sense is for the thoughtful. If one doesn’t wish to think, then one hasn’t any common sense, one has nothing in common with those who do think.
“Generation ‘I,’ or those who were born and raised a little before or after Hillary Clinton’s It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us was published in 1996, is now in college, and, if not in college or in college on its parents’ debt-accruing dime, its members :
Join Code Pink. Join BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanction), an anti-Israeli movement. Enlist in some pro-Palestinian group. Adopts the Arafat-inspired keffiyah as the scarf de rigor for identifying oneself as a pro-Islam, pro-Palestine, or Left Wing idiot. It joins OWS (Occupy Wall Street). They bewail their “white privilege” but join rioters and looters in places like Ferguson, Missouri or Baltimore, Maryland, and hope they’re not mistaken for a patronizing liberal “honky.” Or join or donate to a “gay rights” group.
They sign campus-circulated petitions that endorse “Identity Politics” to enforce political correctness on faculty and student body alike, and in addition join demonstrations and sign petitions in favor of “diversity” on campus and everywhere.
Or, they convert to Islam, as many of their notable ancestors converted.
On the conversion issue, one Christian site, CBN, offers a credible reason why so many Americans (and other Westerners) find conversion to Islam so attractive:
This is the fact that Islam offers a conversion experience and the opportunity to get one’s life in order, without needing to confess one’s sins and need of salvation. In fact, Islam makes quite a point of denying these truths. It tells people they do not need salvation; all they need is to follow the “guidance” of God’s law, and they will make it to heaven. That is something the natural man likes to hear.
In short: No mental labor is necessary to convert. Or, if one has actually achieved something in life, no further thought is necessary. Only a will to believe and submit is required. It is a wish to become an anonymous maquette, or be one with the Islamic Borg (aka, the Umma). It gives them “inner peace and contentment” – the kind one associates with the comatose, the inebriated, or the dead. Allah will decide if you’ve been naughty or nice. Your “salvation” will depend on his mood and what side of the bed he gets up on that morning. You are not to question what kind of Islamic justice he or his jihadis dole out to you or to infidels. Allah can be “merciful.” He can be “compassionate.” But more often than not he’s a raving, sadistic lunatic.
As for the non-converts, the best of them – the ones who have actually read a book or used Wikipedia to research their sociology or political science majors – are the ones who also make a piece of trash like John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces first a cult classic, then a Pulitzer Prize winner, and then a best seller. Allah and PEN and the post-modern culture favor the dunce cap idiot.
We haven’t seen anything yet in the way of inculcated and habitual cluelessness. Wait until the prepubescent and adolescent victims of Common Core move on to college. By that time texting in Pidgin English will be treated as a second language.
Obama wants to flood the country with illegals and Muslims as punishment for the country for being “too white” or “civilized” and governed by the rule of law. He more or less wants to sic the barbarians and criminals on us and call it “social justice.”
Who will be deaf to that demonstrable policy? The useful idiots who voted for him, continue to support him, are always ready with a cheer for him, and who appear to be inoculated by their education against the teeniest virus of reason.
Daniel Greenfield, in his Sultan Knish column of July 26th, “Pay $27 to Discover the Joys of Post-Capitalism,” cited the ravings of a Guardian columnist, Paul Mason, who claimed that computers were causing the slow death of capitalism (where or when has it ever existed not crippled by some level of government intervention?) and the rise of the post-capitalist man and economy.
Mason wrote:
As with the end of feudalism 500 years ago, capitalism’s replacement by postcapitalism will be accelerated by external shocks and shaped by the emergence of a new kind of human being. And it has started.
Greenfield exclaimed: “A new kind of human being!” I might have replied: Or the resurrected “Soviet man”? He quotes from Mason’s article:
” In Greece, when a grassroots NGO mapped the country’s food co-ops, alternative producers, parallel currencies and local exchange systems they found more than 70 substantive projects and hundreds of smaller initiatives ranging from squats to carpools to free kindergartens. To mainstream economics such things seem barely to qualify as economic activity – but that’s the point. They exist because they trade, however haltingly and inefficiently, in the currency of postcapitalism: free time, networked activity and free stuff. It seems a meager and unofficial and even dangerous thing from which to craft an entire alternative to a global system, but so did money and credit in the age of Edward III.”
[Greenfield] It’s not an alternative to a global system. It’s a failed society in which there is no longer an efficient means of obtaining services and achieving full value for time spent. Even an idiot would understand this. A leftist would not.
Well, maybe not idiots. Idiots are not capable of grasping concepts. Leftists would refuse to understand it. The approach of reason and reality would in the typical leftist trigger alarms and klaxons for them to blank out, duck, and cover their ears.
I left this comment on Greenfield’s oft-ironic rejoinders to Mason’s I-am-your-prophet assertions of his own version of the dialectical process:
“There’s no new kind of human being. Like Marx, there’s just an old kind of huckster.” Well, perhaps one might include as a new kind of human being all the iPhone, texting, selfie-obsessed idiots who are the grand kids of the Woodstock and Haight-Ashbury generation. They’ve been properly indoctrinated in our high schools and universities and are ready for that kind of world. That’s the “new kind of human being” – semi-literate enough to “text,” all-knowing that the world and the universe can only be found in an iPhone and not even on Wikipedia, and narcissistic “to the max, man.” Just like Obama at a public event. He must take that selfie with the good-looking Scandinavian chick sitting next to him at Nelson Mandela’s funeral. Self-centered, not reality centered.
And oblivious to reality. To truth. To reason. And indifferent to his oblivion.
Some time ago I watched a series of Jay Leno-type “man on the street” or “man on campus” question-and-answer videos. Most of the people interviewed were under thirty, or were students. Most of them displayed an appalling and frightening level of ignorance, such as thinking or “knowing” that Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed during the Civil War and that Canada was once one of the American states before it seceded. The take-home-your-prize answer to the fellow’s one question, “When was the Bill of Rights ratified?” was, “I didn’t know they have microwaves back then.” Back when? I didn’t matter when. That answer, as I recall, was delivered with a dead pan expression of sincerity.
Which is usually the mark of an idiot out to sea without so much as a paddle. The “new human being.” A citizen of the New World Order, the Land of Idiots, in which the one-eyed halfwit is king.
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