Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Dear George,   What an enlightened era we live in.  How sophisticated and humane we have become.  In the days when kings ruled by divine right, oppression was a steel boot that kept the people cowed and broken.  In our current age of crypto-democracy, oppression is a commodity we must market as if it were an anti-aging cream.    The function of oppression, be it brutal or humane, is to both neutralize and isolate the underclasses from their betters since it is a given that these underclasses would tear out their betters throats if they had a chance, or so you would have their betters believe.   In our golden age, we market oppression under the rubric, “Quality of Life,” which plays well with a people who associate happiness with a sanitary bubble.  It is then easy to link quality of life with that sure-fire marketing tool, “crime.”  Out of this evolves the myth that the best way to crack down on major crime is to crack down on petty crimes.  In other words, bust a kid for spray-painting some graffiti and you guarantee he will never commit the murder he would have committed had you not busted him for spray-painting a wall.  The browner the kid’s skin, the truer the myth is.   Neatness is another of oppression’s effective marketing tools.  A society obsessed with neatness will want to keep its walls, telephone poles, and mailboxes free of posters advocating dissent and revolution. They also want to keep the grass in their parks green and untrod upon, which is why many cities have banned large crowds from their commons.  Both neatness and fastidiousness arise from a need for a unity of thought and action.  Unity is conformity, and conformity is the ultimate goal of an authoritarian regime.    Dissent is messy and smells bad.  It forces people to think thoughts they’d rather not think.  It’s unsettling and disturbing.  Just as today’s spray-painter is tomorrow’s murderer, so is today’s dissident tomorrow’s revolutionary.    The more a person becomes addicted to the sanitary life, they more apprehensive and intolerant they become of the filth dissent.[1]   Your admirer, Belacqua Jones [1] Thanks to JoAnn Wypijewski for her article, “A Message to You Rudy Giuliani, which can be found at http://motherjones.com. 5:51:46 AM    comment []

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