As the Inauguration of Trumpp (spelled with an extra P for a double dose of that pee-pee) looms on the horizon, I have started un-following people on Facebook again. Not un-friending, mind you-- un-following, because some of their fucking posts are intolerable to read day in and day out.
But the people I've been un-following are NOT Trump supporters. In fact, ever since Bladdergate (as my Facebook cohort BJ Fornicatti so eloquently labeled the Moscow dossier pseudo-scandal) it seems likes all the MAGATS (acronym for Make America Great Again Trumpp Supporters) have been laying low. I don't have a lot of MAGATS on my Facebook account anyway, but the ones whom I know for a fact did vote for Trumpp have been relatively silent as of late. Good for them.
No, it's the loudmouth Obama Haters on the Left that I've had to un-follow. I now understand how people who were once radical and liberal turn conservative over the years; all they have to do is watch their peers become intolerant assholes. Then they figure that they'd rather embrace the Grand Old Party than have to be lumped in with the kind of people who have the balls to praise President Obama for commuting Chelsea Manning's sentence but then turn around and say "It's not enough" or "How many kids did you bomb today?"
Luckily, I will never turn into a GOP stooge, no matter how many of my so-called liberal friends unwittingly subscribe to the Horseshoe Theory (see earlier posts). The rest of my so-called liberal friends only voted for Hillary out of sheer terror: they saw the Trumpp monster rearing its ugly head and held their noses to vote for Hillary. I commend them for at least trying but I remember how much shade they threw at her at the beginning of the primaries.
Then there is a small minority, perhaps less than 1%, of my liberal friends who know the score, who talk the talk and walk the walk with amazing conviction and consistency. They are not the types who talk shit about CNN but praise Buzzfeed; they are not the kind that would say something stupid like "Bernie would've beaten Trumpp" when Bernie's ACA bill got shot down by even the likes of Corey Booker. These relatively few bastions of liberal light wouldn't even think of considering Corey Booker as a Democratic candidate for 2020 in the first place, because they don't buy into any narratives.
Instead, they create their own narratives, and they are usually based on actual information instead of links to dubious websites and reposts. Here's an example of one, posted by a Facebook friend whose initials are KS.
This comment was in response to someone who stated that, just like Trump, Hillary would've stacked her Cabinet with Goldman Sachs people as well.
Not all corporatists agree with each other. Many are in direct competition with each other and have opposing goals. Like many major corporations want universal healthcare for Americans because the cost of insurance is a significant burden to their company. Then there are the corporatists who see raping the American public on healthcare costs as a viable profit center. Which corporatists do you want running healthcare? Same with things like regulating Wall Street. Some are raiders out to scam as much money as they can. Others see that instability as a huge risk to their businesses that will crash the economy and destroy their business when there is no one to buy their products. One brand of corporation depends on a healthy vibrant economy and consumers with disposable income to power their profits. The other type of corporation makes money by crashing other people's dreams. I know who's side I'm voting for in that scenario. I know which one works out better for most people. I'm not fooled by the argument that both sides represent major business interests. That isn't a monolithic block with uniform policies.
I like this comment very much because KS did not buy into that whole 'Shillary' narrative, and retorted by (gasp!) coming up with an informed opinion of his own, one that is no doubt echoed by many (such as myself) and yet still original because it wasn't spoonfed to him by the types of people who want to take credit for all of Obama's successes and none of his failures.
I mean, let's face it: Obama was a corporate President. He ran the country like a corporation. That is the new trend for the 21st Century. Why do you think the Powers That Be (and in this case, those powers may be Russian!) wanted a businessman to run the country for the next 4 to 8 years? But corporations are not what they used to be. For example: it's corporate lawyers and lobbyists who are advancing the marijuana legalization movement in Colorado. Not hippies. Not NORML, although they are still a valid organization for information on the subject. These people have wrested control of the market from cartels and hippie mafias, and now people in Denver can smoke weed without fear of reprisal. California never got that far with their agenda-- yeah, you can get a Rx but no one remembers that it was the Emerald Triangle on the West Coast that lobbied to have Proposition 19 shot down. Prop 19 would've allowed people to grow up to five plants in their home. Big Pharma didn't kill that measure, hippies in Oregon did. Shit, even Gov. Schwarzenegger did more for pot decriminalization than the Humboldt pot posse.
So you see, as distasteful as the notion of a corporate USA is, the sad fact is: it's here. It's been here, for a while. If you are still violently anti-everything corporate then you are living in a past that you never experienced. The question now is: do I support good corporations or bad corporations? Or rather, do I support good ideas or bad ideas? Because I can hate Monsanto and still think GMO foods have a useful application. I can hate Apple products and decry their labor practices abroad but also know that they are trying harder than most companies to make progress. I can loathe Wal-Mart and at the same time know that, because of pressure from protest groups, they occasionally kowtow to the needs and demands of the people. I can admire Al Gore for being environmentally conscious even though his wife wanted to censor rock albums in the '80's.
Hell, even Pearl Jam and Prince did business with Target after they changed some major policies.
It's not hypocrisy anymore. It's awareness that things are complex, shaded, not black and white. And that's the danger of Trumpp: he's fooling his supporters into thinking those black and white days are here again. They're not. Even he knows it, but he used that illusion to get his way. And it worked.
It's only hypocrisy if you fight against your own best interests... no, scratch that. It's stupidity that makes us fight against our own best interests... stupidity that I can fortunately block out by un-following unreasonable people online, which makes my head feel better and my days nicer.
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