Ideologies are bad, m'kay?

 I suppose we could revisit Zager and Evans, ideologies are bad, m'kay?

Why are they bad? Because they usually become lampoonishly infallible dogma that fallibly fails to accomplish anything except abject horribleness.

Does that mean your particular religion, your party, your ideals, your wants and needs? No, of course not. Unless it leads to killing people, then boo to that.

What's the deal with Ukraine? I guess Russia doesn't want Ukraine to join NATO? The invasion of Crimea back in 2014 was predicated on the dispute about who owns it. Is it part of Ukraine or is it part of Russia? The Russians who live there supposedly say Russia. The narrative has always been first-world America vs second-world Russia in an economic grudge match for the championship belt. That's dumb.

Before we all get confused, i'm not talking about human rights violations, war, shirtless horseback rides across the tundra, any of that stuff. I'm talking about the kind of "our sports team is better than yours and we'll light this car on fire to prove it" garbage blasted from all directions into our poor, fragile central nervous systems. 

We're dealing with second and third generation connotations here. "Welfare State" doesn't refer to food stamps and social security and unemployment insurance, those are merely three poorly constructed manifestations of a huge variety of possible systems that represent a government attempting to assist rather than dictate the lives of its citizens. 

I would argue that nation-states are simply Capitalism in is most extreme, belligerent form.  What differentiates a President from a King or a Despot? Certainly not the structure of hierarchical bureaucracy, that is their commonality. There is no structural difference between a constitution, a list of commandments, a book of proverbs; they are the structure of ideology itself. In themselves they represent not the path to a goal, but the conservation of privilege for their most devout evangelists.

Liberty and freedom, then, are not some state of being bestowed upon us by some benevolent being, but the result of our own refusal to infringe upon the liberty and freedom of others, to refuse to make choices in our own interest for a common good, to in fact reject the ideologies we most admire and desire. Liberty can only be given away, not seized or conserved. 

This is of course the radical Leftist in me talking, but an elected king is still a king, the cabinet and congress are still the king's court, the rival kings are still rivals in this game of thrones. A king who does nothing of consequence is absurd.

I am certainly not the first or only person to claim that Marxism is the worship of Marx as Christianity is the worship of Christ, nor am i the only person pointing out that America has never had a non-authoritarian President. How could it? 

The rude thing Biden said into a live microphone is no different than any other President, because the President is still merely a person. Rather than some supposed sign of hypocrisy, we must recognize it for what it really was: a window overlooking honesty built into a mansion of dishonesty. That honesty may not bear resemblance to your own, but the underlying/overdetermining dishonesty is not of the President's, or government's, or Constitution's making (the Russian Federation is now a Constitutional Republic, after all), it is instead the result of the collective psyche's refusal to accept the consequences of choice. I propose that that refusal of acceptance is in fact the pride of ideology itself. The winner must win, the slighted achieve justice, the good be rewarded, the bad be punished, immortality by any means necessary.

Our notion of Capitalism makes no such guarantee. In fact, it is predicated on the equality of failure. Not only must institutions fail no matter their size or intent, the more agreeable or popular their mission the more painful their failure must be. Those aren't my rules, this isn't my game, but they are the rules of the game nonetheless. The freest of laissez-faire black markets is the tyranny of the majority, it will make whatever choice it makes without hesitation and be replaced by another after it has reached saturation. 

The will of the people is not some magical teleological consensus, it is 3-million disparate voices screaming for a few moments of silence during the daily deluge of disastrophe. The rallying cry is, after all, give me liberty. The irony of course is that we confuse giving for taking, a fortune for fortune, freedom for the better of bad choices (which aren't really choices at all). 

There is immense sadness in the doing of good deeds, and that sadness arises from the recognition that for that brief moment in time that good deed is the exception, an abnormality. That brief moment of kindness, help, decency, call it what you will, that brief moment of trivial grace is an oasis in the desert of misery that forms the fabric of existence. That deep, unexpressable gratitude in the eyes of a fellow human breaks my heart, shatters my soul, and tells me there is so much more mountain to climb than i even imagined. 

These have been brain thoughts with Bottle. No  warranty expressed or implied. May cause dandruff. I have no idea why Polyvinyl records included this blue-raspberry flavored airheads with my Hum records, but i am definitely not complaining. Mysteries of life.