shanen's Journal: You, too, have been conscripted as cannon fodder fighting for corporate cancers!

Alternative title: Since when and how deeply has Trump been destroying America?

[This was actually drafted for Facebook under the banner "We need to ask the surviving draftees about the real meaning of conscription. All of us have been drafted as cannon fodder now."]

It's more than the extreme party discipline of today's so-called Republican Party, though Lenin's Bolsheviks could only be sick with envy. The GOP cancer is not even malignant on its own, but rather it's a kind of metastasis from the much larger cancer of corporations. Capitalism is dead and we're now in an age of corporate cancerism, and the main selling point for politicians is how cheaply they can be bribed, where the GOP is winning too much and it's making the nation and even the world sick. (I'm NOT denying that many Democratic pols also get too much corporate money, but a lot of that money is more like insurance payments in contrast to the ROI quid pro quo bribes.)

Insofar as YOU participate in today's modern economy, YOU, TOO, have been drafted and "Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing" which of the corporate cancers shall maximize its profits to infinity and buy out and destroy the rest of them.

You probably didn't notice, but you are getting conscripted every time you blindly click your acceptance on (or less blindly sign) a huge pile of legalese that absolves some corporate cancer of ANY liability for whatever it does to you. I think Microsoft actually perfected the art with their EULA that basically says you have no rights (AT ALL) to threaten Microsoft's profits. It doesn't matter what they did or how egregiously they did it. It doesn't matter what sort of harm the cancer causes you. It doesn't matter what sort of personal information gets lost or stolen or abused against you. You or your company may be jailed or bankrupted, but you can't touch Microsoft for ANY part of it. You might entertain some doubts about how well the EULA might stand up in court, but you better remember what sort of so-called judges sit on today's SCOTUS (and what sort of crooks put them there).

As I noted, capitalism is dead. In the age of corporate cancerism we live by a much simpler creed:

"There is no gawd but profit, and #FatNixon is NO prophet."

I see only one extremely thin sliver of hope, and it goes back to Honest Abe's most famous speech again. He was advocating for "government of the people, by the people, for the people", remember? Today's GOP seems to be caught in a kind of civil war of its own, with the mainstream GOP seeking government of the corporations, by the lawyers, for the richest 0.1%, while #PresidentTweety just wants government of, by, and for the Donald. However even if that civil war destroys the final shreds of the Republican brand, I am not sanguine that the Democratic Party will do much with the GOP's implosion.

By the way, I should note that I personally missed the draft, which means the veterans who experienced military conscription are even older than I am. I suspect they learned important lessons from their service, even though it was obligatory. I do think we (not just America) face another kind of existential crisis today... We need to learn from them, and quick.

Even further by the way, I'm sure that some aspects of this long diatribe were triggered by a wartime book I'm reading just now. It's called "Don't Shoot, It's Only Me" by Bob Hope (of USO fame) and Melville Shavelson. One of the bits that hit me really hard appears on page 88, where he's contrasting the present day (the book was published in 1990) with how things were back in 1942. He was helping to sell war bonds back then, and he's joking about where the money is now versus then. I'm sure he intended this as a joke when he writes:

"Another thing about war that has hurt its popularity in recent years is that it's expensive. Even Donald Trump couldn't afford to finance a really big war today. The U.S. needed cash then, Trump wasn't around, so the Treasury Department came up with the [idea of celebrity shows to sell war bonds]... This group of ordinary citizens [but referring to a long list of celebrities from 1942] sold a billion dollars' worth of bonds in the days when that was real money. When Howard Hughes heard about it, he shook his head and said, 'A billion dollars! That's a small fortune.'"

The Trump invasion of our national consciousness started a LONG time ago. Remember that Bob Hope still had the 1990 image of Trump as extremely rich when the YUGE reality was that Trump was going bankrupt and being recruited by the KGB with YUGE piles of dirty rubles.