Friday, August 18, 2006
A Cup Half Empty of the Obvious
It's become the standard party line in the repertoire of "news" writers everywhere; many journalists from the New York Times, Reuters, Associated Press, Spiegel, or Le Monde etc. hold an obsessive fascination for focusing personal political resentments upon micro problems in U.S. society – or any other Western democracy of choice. Any writers so disposed can surely find areas of poverty, suffering or injustice in daily life as easily as one can find "collateral damage" in the middle of a war. Oddly, for some, it's still impossible however to see the great strides and successes that are the hallmark of contemporary free society, or the balance sheet that repeatedly proves that a free dynamic society is a cup more than half full. Of course, while all the bad stuff in the human condition continues to be highlighted in Journalism's Left-land; normal daily life goes on with less drama and greater comfort. Pointing out normal days at school, average days at work, and bourgeois indulgence in modern creature comforts just doesn't promote "the cause" as well as reports on crisis or misfortune. So it is now that the faux-rebel with the coolest collection of pirated music and leisure time in coffee shops can whine the most about the "injustice and oppression" of our current historical circumstance.
It all eventually comes down to perceptions I suppose. For some the cup is half full and for others it's half empty – regardless of how full their bank account or CD collection may be. Some just see the worst and demand the adoption of their imposed "solutions" (always a more enhanced and centralized state and greater regulation of individual lives). This same cast of characters has showed up throughout history as Nazis, Fascists, Religious fanatics, and lukewarm pseudo-socialists who hate capitalism, while daily savoring every manifestation of it that they can lay their hands on (don't remind them that those pirated tunes and movies in their materialist collection weren't produced by a state ministry of fun and games).
While the Chomsky types (this would effectively describe most intellectual leftists) intuitively guess at the motivation and plots of media conglomerate's wealthy owners, these same "geniuses" manage to completely miss or overlook the obvious left-wing sympathies of kindred spirit editorial staffs and journalist's daily preachings (often reported as objective "news").
While the type of deluded bohemian I write of makes much of the "high literacy rate" in their favorite gulag – Cuba – the point is somehow missed on them that a literacy rate is of little value in a society that highly restricts what can be read, or even accessed, in modern media channels. But hey, their hearts – and prison stockades – are in the right place.
To the left of our time (actually, nothing has changed, this has always been the case with them) the continuing advance and achievement of free society is a cup half empty and will always be seen as such (until they and their philosophies can turn the clock back to -- the stone age -- when we were all supposedly "equal").
With all their attempts to appear logical, wise, and peaceful, they fail to hide their half cup of bitterness and rage. They're mad and, I dare say -- to use one of their phrases -- "full of hate." While some hold signs calling for an end to war (always, only certain wars and certain sides) their other hands are typically raised into a fist; a more than revealing symbol of socialists' sentiment and character everywhere.
These are the people and the mindset that now justifies, distorts, or sympathizes with the actions of Muslim national socialists just as they had once before for Stalin's and Mao's communist gulags -- the pampered class of spoiled, overeducated and under worked depressives; angry at their parents, angry at their failure and lack of significance in a world bustling with dynamism and progress, and angry at a cup who's contents they seem to never truly see. Their cup is full of the bitterness and poison of "philosopher kings" who will never hold court.
Their cup is half full of nonsense, and the other half, empty.
