Andrew Reid: Curb Your Enthusiasm

The anti-Obama propaganda has started.

Some Americans are guaffing and laughing at the economic stimulus plan. Money towards new cars for scrapping old polluting cars. Cash for Clunkers! Madness! The anti-Obama crowd were saying things like “Yeahaar! Maybe we should have a cash for clucker’s programme and pay people to eat Chicken!”. Then one fat necked Republican news reporter spouted a complaint saying “car dealers can’t cope with demand… its craaaazy out there!!”

Jon Stewart’s Today ran this story with the caption:

Master
……Rebaters

They also ran a quote from a state senator in South Carolina joking that a Gorilla which escaped from a zoo was in fact an ansestor of Michelle Obama.

To lighten an atmosphere poluted by the backwardness of a red neck America which doesn’t believe in evolution but can happily compare a Barack’s wife to a gorillia, Jon Stewart decided to scribble some alternative stimulous plans on a piece of scrap paper on his desk.

“Money for people with really large asses… Cash for Badooka donka!”.

But among the sound of fat asses going badooka donka, the prevailing sound coming out of America post-Obama is the noise of people going about their business at the expense of the world. Change? Obama? Progress? Nah - we like it as it is, say the fat racist part of America.

The dream which Obama stood for… still stands for, is being ignored by the majority of horse fuckers in South Carolina, is being belittled by cowboy politicians and double glazing businessmen.

Of course that the underprivileged suddenly had ‘hope’ got White America worried. The White America which doesn’t speak for the kind of people I know.

None of my friends have ever fucked at horse.

Or sneered at TV ‘news’ reports of cats with their heads stuck in yoghurt pots. “Hahaha look at that stupid fucking animal!”

The only stupid fucking animal I know is human… a cheerleader who wears a tshirt with the slogan Cocks Rock. A prime example of closed minded idiocy. Although that sentence sounds like a prime example of intellectual snobbery. I guess the truth probably lies somewhere in between.

Between the white picket fence, the dodge truck and the beer belly White Trash America knows in it’s heart of hearts that it is wrong.

They rock back and forth, shifting over and over in their sleep (dreaming of horses to fuck), panicking religiously.

There is one aspect I agree with despite the bovine idiocy of religion. The vicar.

A few pennies drop onto his collection plate. He lives in a small house and serves a small (and diminishing) church. Yet he is happy trimming the roses and praying for forgiveness over (amongst other things) Internet porn.

But despite appearances, the vicar and the banker both share something in common. An overwhelming belief in a fantasy which through the sheer number of believers has become reality.

As I saw the news of Barclays £5 billion profit in the depths of an economic crisis, I ran the palm of my hands over my skull in sheer frustration. But it should come as no surprise, because my skull - like the skull of all human kind, is dwarfed even by the size of my toilet seat. The problem is not the system, or the evils of capitalism, or the greed of any one person acting on his own. The problem is the combined achievement of all that’s bad about human nature.

The impulses and dreams which trigger our sense of reward are out of control like a faulty scientific experiment involving monkeys and peanuts.

The lure of money has been enough to send the banking industry insane, like a dribbling mental asylum freak crawling across the floor leaving a smearing trail of raw shit behind it. Everybody responsible for carrying out their day jobs in the financial sector have directly contributed to the perverse rise of the biggest downfall the world has ever seen. It’s time for a wake up call. The banks should all be split up at once, the world over. There should be no loop holes, no haven for ex-investment bankers. If they want to continue their career in banking they do so as a service to the world’s people. As a force for good. Every dime of profit is sent to those in need of a leg up. Governments, community organisers, African villages, infrastructure projects and people who live under 4ft high gaps in railway bridges with cardboard for wallpaper in India. These people have as much right on the money made by the hard work of the financial sector staff, as they do. Because their hard work is over-rewarded by a ratio of 100:1. The financial sector should be happy they have jobs at all, such has been the mass rip off of those who so unwittingly feed their salaries.

A smoky cloak and mirror obscured magic trick - this is what the financial sector has become. It doesn’t serve the people. It serve’s itself on a magic carpet of mathematical nonsense, which makes sense only to those who have engineered the world’s fantasy sector to accept this as the truth of the system. When it comes to the reality of the people, you see it on their credit card bills, on their bank statements, in the lure of the shopping centre, on their loans and in the bank’s marketing strategies.

It’s time to close the book on fantasy, and open a new one about reality.

The reality bible. No God, but happily no investment bankers either.

There was a man in American who believed that God would cure his sick daughter.

Unfortunately, he was so steadfast in this belief that he failed to call the doctor, and she died.

A wake up call swings like a wreaking ball into his belief in the healing power of Our Kind Lord. Or not.

He ended up in court, where the judge sentenced him to 25 years in jail for murder. The man is seen smiling as the verdict is read out, thinking that ‘God is really testing him this year’.

The next day, another man arrived in court accused of downloading 30 songs from the Internet. The music industry lawyers had decided to make an example of him, in the belief that he had committed $14 million worth of damages. The judge ‘took a lenient line’ and decided only to fine the man $700,000. If the verdict stands after his appeal, he will file for bankruptcy. He is accused of downloading songs by the Smashing Pumpkins and Green Day, one of whose albums is called American Idiot.

The guy was listening to the lyrics of American Idiot, while a lawyer filed the case against him on behalf of the multi billion pound music industry he’d so damaged.

Don’t want to be an American idiot.
One nation controlled by the media.
Information age of hysteria.
It’s calling out to idiot America.

And so the previous generation wallows in failure and wilts in the white heat of technology, and the new generation seems pathetically trapped in the wreckage.

False choices abound, from the fleeting moments spent with your girlfriend on holiday watching the blood red sun sink into the cool blue ocean before your morning flight back to nowhereland, and a shadowy existence spent chained to a chair behind a desk, prostituting your brain and your slowly deteriorating fattening body for the financial gain of a few.

False choices, like democratically elected governments who are all the same and who rule between themselves as the decades pass by with not so much a flicker of real change or freedom.

False choices, like the weekends littered with drunks and drinking, pointless shopping unwittingly feeding the machine which traps us here in the first place just for the sake of a moment’s entertainment, for the lack of anything meaningful to do.

False choices, like going to work or staying at home. The false choice of too much Western freedom.

Furrowing my brow I thought… there must be something in each one of us which is waiting to get out and run free, something not exploitable for financial or political gain. Something pure and innocent. Something so incredible that others can only look on and enjoy what we have to offer.

So I watched a film called with Joey about a typical Japanese family, who have two son’s one a young boy aged 11 and an older 18 year old. The father loses his job but doesn’t tell anybody, and pretends to go to work each day. There he meets a friend from school, whom is doing exactly the same. Meanwhile, the young son runs through the compact twisting Tokyo streets and he spots an old keyboard in the junk at the side of the road under a railway bridge. He brings it home and plugs it in but no sound emanates from the speaker-less Roland MIDI synthesiser. Inspired, for reasons he doesn’t fully understand, he goes to take piano lessons whilst his family on one single day collapses around him, for reasons he doesn’t fully understand.

4 months later, and the young son is at a music school and performs a sonata in an exam, watched by his parents. He’s a musical genius and the crowd gathers around as the sonata concludes, there is only silence, wet eyes and open mouths.

The little genius then trots off with his dysfunctional family.

I downloaded this film via Bit Torrent.

Come and find me, you stupid fucking American, British, French, Belgian, Swiss, Chinese, African, Argentine Idiots.

You can hear it in the beat they march to
And you can feel the earth shake when they start to dance
You can tell by the way they move you
It’s not murder, it’s an act of faith, baby.