"...and all you see is people rushing by you, on their way to the trains that are taking them anywhere but here."

My working hypothesis for the 21st Century is that the robber baron oligarchs are in the business of producing a post-industrial world where the Ruling Class has all the technology and 99(+)% of humanity simply subsists in serfdom.

It's so much easier to control- and to stay on top if you're the kind of brain-dead and soul-dead oligarch Skull & Bones seems to be graduating.

It's the only explanation that makes any sense.

Tiabbi:

...The old-style, Soviet-perfected, Living Color-referenced Cult of Personality was a kind of irrational hero-worship in which the Great Leader would be credited with everything from the invention of the threshing machine to big band jazz to low crime and high fertility rates. He never served in battle, but he was a military hero whose medals clinked during parades. The essence of the Cult of Personality was its knee-jerk irrationality and its pervasiveness.

There was absolutely no reason to think Joe Stalin would know anything about poetry or literature, or agriculture or history, and no rational reason why people would want him to be an expert on these things, but millions of people loved the idea that he was an authority even there. You had to be out of your freaking mind to want to think of Stalin as the world’s greatest poet, but there were such people. Lots of them.

It’s sort of the same, only in reverse, with all of this anti-Obama stuff. There are plenty of rational reasons to disapprove of the Obama administration. There are plenty of curious policy decisions in his history already and he has already drawn plenty of real ideological lines in the sand that people looking to whine about something could whine about, if they so chose.

But instead of that, the opponents of Barack Obama seem determined to make a villain out of him almost solely on the basis of his completely innocent and irrelevant behaviors. Instead of bitching at him for things like giving away billions of dollars via his Public-Private Investment Program — a natural rallying cry for conservatives, you would think — they’re constantly getting on his balls about stuff that has no relevance to anything at all, much less the conservative-liberal divide. It’s almost as though the haters have an emotional attachment to the notion of Obama as being guilty of and responsible for everything, from bad weather to the lack of good movies outside of District 9 to the flattening out of Brandon Webb’s sinker...

...follows this:

I found most of the content of Moore’s movie horrifying. It was also striking to me that the theme he is addressing here, i.e. the rapid peasant-ization of most of the country, is basically a taboo subject for every other major media outlet in the country. The vast majority of our movies are either thinly-disguised commercials for consumer products (Law Abiding Citizen), remakes of old shows and movies designed to transport us back to the good old days when life was better (i.e. Fame) , or gushy nerf-tripe with no hard edges crafted to serve as escapist fairy tales for stressed-out adults wanting to dream of happy endings (Love Happens).

What we call a “good movie” is usually also escapism, and sometimes even also a nostalgic remake, it just happens to be well-done and expertly directed, with great production values and acting performances...

But we’re living in a time of extreme crisis almost nothing on TV or in the movies is designed to get us thinking about how to fix our problems. If anything, most of the stuff on TV is designed to jack up our anxiety level without offering any solutions except the short-term fixes of buying and eating — witness the endless reality shows in which ordinary people slave away and scheme against each other for weeks on end for a 1 in 12 shot at a (pick one) modeling job/date with a non-deformed, non serial-killing person/chance to be shouted at by Donald Trump.

Now that stuff is cynical and monstrous. It is my sincere hope that the people who are producing these programs will someday be tried and executed by war crimes tribunals at the Hague.

At least Michael Moore is getting us talking about the right topics...

Athenae picks up on this thread:

...the crazy teabag rage has come from a vague sense...that our lives are not what we think they should be.

Frank Herbert once said an Emperor provides many opportunities for his subjects to fail.

That crazy rage is there to motivate you to live the way the $ystem wants you. That crazy rage is blinding you to the real Wolf. You want to not get eaten?

Calm down, find your target, take aim, and fire.

The worst that could happen? The big bad wolf takes you before you get your bearings, but that's going to happen anyway if you keep your eye on the gadflies.