Science, Society, Sociology.

As you may or may not know, I am in no case a great fan of the Occupy movement. Yes, the problems to which they cry out against are very tangible and real, but they are widely disorganized and have no realistic plan of action. Some of their claims show inherent logical fallacies; others are simply jejune. However, I was asked to write a satire, and I chose to write it against the so called “1%.” Without further ado:  

During times of economic crisis, stagnated markets, and pecuniary woes, there is a class of a certain socioeconomic status that is invariably dealt the harshest blow and must unceasingly strive to lift itself above the pitiless oppression and unsolicited scorn so callously heaped unto it. This is the class that, with its daily toils, supports the colossal mainframe of our industrial power, the class that through its strain and strife, transmutes the wild and unruly bounty ofAmericainto tempered growth and prosperity. This class is, of course, that of the executives, CEOs, businessmen, bankers, and all other proprietors of a significant chunk ofColumbia’s coffer. Take heed, theirs is not an easy job. No, the rest of us, being common men, can only stare on in amazement and wonder at the long, sleepless nights, the dreadful palpitations of anxiety, and the wretched convulsions of angst that must so surely accompany such great wealth. It is indubitable that such positions as theirs can not be even comprehended, much less fulfilled by the mere mortal. Nevertheless, I will endeavor my best to assuage their worries and hopefully will succeed in at least addressing the earnest problems that plague these benevolent and gracious minds. From this point forward, this speech is directed to and in honor of these wonderful individuals.

The most pressing concern is of course that of wealth, or more accurately the exhibition of such. It is the consensus of the general public that wealth, although admired and coveted, should never be flung about in lavish displays. However, it is safe to say that, with your annual pay being several orders of magnitude greater than that of the average Joe, you are most certainly not of the general public and must thus ignore such a consensus at all costs. Do not be afraid to spend your million dollar bonus on a fifth Italian sports car or a chateau in southernFrance. Of what use is money if not for refining the fine art of profligate purchasing? Surely you aren’t expected to put such money in something as rational and mundane like a retirement fund as is done by the unwashed masses. When you’ve finished embellishing your life with superfluous flourishes, take the timeless advice of T.S. Elliot and be sure to end your cognac fueled existence not with a whimper, but with a bang. Although the preferred methods appear to be heart failure or drug overdose, the adventurous may want to consider hiring hit-men to do the job, or for the particularly brave of heart, simply visiting the local Occupy movement. As for your will, do not make the novice mistake of consigning all of your estate to your favorite charity organization or terrorist cell. Instead, show the uncivilized proletariat that you are still richer than them, even in death, and merely sign off your entire savings over to your beloved cat.

While all of this is good and proper, before you embark on your first-class voyage to the afterlife (complete with complimentary champagne), you might be accosted, during several encounters, with a vile and nasty word called “responsibility.” Although you may insist that you have no idea what that word means, the persons accosting will most certainly accuse you of neglecting it multiple times before they are hauled away by your private security forces. I will therefore explain this concept in simple words that you will be sure to understand. Responsibility, being a portmanteau of the words “response” and “ability,” is simply the ability for someone in your position to respond to an unfortunate circumstance for which you are accountable and immediately take evasive action to shirk all duties necessary and proper. Whereas this skill requires decades of practice to achieve a significant level of finesse, those inexperienced may employ a simple tactic called plausible deniability in which the user simply declares that he knows nothing. The benefit of that statement is, of course, that it may not necessarily be a lie. In the worst case, if you are ever called before a court, in any case short of an oil spill you may simply decide to settle out of court, where your bodyguards may compel the opposite party to become disposed towards right direction. If you are in fact answerable to an oil spill, however, a similar maneuver merely calls for you to throw money in the direction of the coastline that you tainted and wait for internecine fighting between the agencies of that particular cash-strapped state to start.

In response to increased usage of Forbes wealth listings as hit-lists, those who have significant pecuniary influence are advised to improve their public relations. Studies have shown that donating to magnanimous organizations and activist groups can significantly reduce the risk of your assassination. Donating to less-than-legal groups such as the local gangs or maybe even international crime rings can increase your “street cred,” and if you happen to be in the munitions industry, may even be subject to company reimbursement as a form of corporate investment. The occasional high profile event also doesn’t hurt. Infrequent yet elaborate speeches at public galas will only increase the natural aura of intrigue that surrounds such well-off individuals, and in this unstable economy, speechwriters come relatively cheap. For example, I, for one, only charge the reasonable and quite affordable price of $499 per page. If all else fails and you are simply too socially inept to enrapture the public, simply stage a failed assassination. Nothing adds more charm to a man than being shot almost to death.

In closing, my friends, I must call to attention my most deep and profound thanks for the time and effort you have dedicated towards safeguarding the welfare of this country and in unceasingly placing public service before self. I believe that I speak for not only my peers, but for the entire general public when I say that this country would certainly not be in the current economic situation without your continuous, conscious efforts and that numerous charities would not have expanded without the demand created with your help. You have stirred up a maelstrom of passionate emotion within the American people the likes of which has not been seen for many a year. You are our heroes, our benefactors, and most importantly, ambassadors ofAmerica’s financial power and goodwill in the form of outsourcing. God bless you, and God bless free trade.

Today, amongst all of the Rapture-related drabble in the news, a single event stood out. Fang Binxing, the chief architect of the Great Firewall of China, was assaulted by a barrage of eggs and shoes – or rather, angry students initiating such barrages – while visiting Wuhan University in Hubei. What’s interesting about this is not so much that the man was attacked. It’s no surprise, and seeing that most of the eggs reportedly missed, the Mr. Fang is undoubtedly lucky that the netizens of China chose to arm themselves with things as trivial as produce and lack the organized firepower of foreign groups such as Anonymous. Then again, the reason why China does not have similar virtual hornet nests is because spawn sites such as 4chan are blocked due to his firewall, so in a sense, he can thank himself for the lack of larger attacks. On the other hand, there probably wouldn’t be such protests in the first place if there wasn’t a firewall. What can be seen here is the dilemma that the PRC is facing with censorship today.

You see, compared to other governments around the world, the PRC is rather unique. Its job is to control a country with a population that exceeds a billion, a population that accomplishes monumental tasks that would be undreamt of in other countries through sheer volume of manpower alone. It’s been said that the Yellow River is the source of China’s sorrow and its prosperity, and the same holds true for China’s immense population. A deluge of humans working in tandem can be just as powerful as a flooding river, and the Communist Party, which owes its origins to this fact, knows it just too well. (Well enough, as it seems, to have tried to dam the population in more ways than one.) The current government was formed out of the ashes of a decade of war a little more than 60 years ago – many citizens are still alive who can remember the Liberation. Because of this relatively juvenile state of things, almost everyone in China is aware of just how powerful revolutions and rebellions can be, and inversely, just how frail governments are. Here in America, we may joke about Texas secession and militia uprisings leading to a collapse of governance, but it never goes beyond that. The jokes remain jokes. In China, the past is still very fresh in the minds of those in the upper echelons. To them, such whisperings are not jokes at all, but instead valid threats to the legitimacy of the current government. Although the widespread paranoia of the Cultural Revolution has long subsided, the specter of mistrust still haunts those in power, who fear that they, like so many emperors and leaders before them, may too become victims of the fickle populace. China, with a rich history of relatively minor rebellions blossoming into nationwide crises, obviously doesn’t want to take any chances, which is why draconian devices such as the Great Firewall have been erected. Overall, one may say that such methods have been effective. The Jasmine Uprisings of this year have come and gone, and China remained absolutely untouched. However, under the surface lies a complex issue. The firewall and other guards “of a harmonious society”, too often instigate what they seek to prevent: protests. When this happens, the PRC usually takes one of two courses of action, either they: if the event is small, like the one we’ve seen today, ignore it and hope it goes away, or: crack down on all the associated dissidents. Neither way helps. Due to the Broken Windows Effect, when small crimes go unpunished, they trigger increased frequencies of similar petty transgressions, until the transgressions are no longer petty and instead become of genuine concern. Heavyhandedly cracking down on protestors or heightening levels of censorship on the other hand merely exacerbates the issue in a more direct manner by unsurprisingly causing more resentment and rebellion, and China, with an average of around 100,000 strikes and other such disturbances a year, already has its hands full. When force is used, it causes protests. When force isn’t used, more people protest. It’s a Catch-22. You almost feel sorry for the poor guys who are in charge of this.

So how will things turn out? It’s most likely that as the years pass and the older officials are phased out and replaced with ones who grew up in the digital age, censorship and human rights infringements are likely to become less and less prevalent and associated with China. After all, modern China is a pretty good example of what America was like during the Age of the Robber Barons, filthy air and all. For now, the Great Firewall and other Orwellian antics will remain, and maybe that’s a good thing, compared to the many forms of anarchy that the Chinese have witnessed in preceding governments. Perhaps humans are indeed just another resource that needs to be subjugated and moderated. Only time will validate this assumption.

P.S. Darn it, I was just going to use this as a little anecdote and instead write about the U.S. and the 1^st Amendment, but it ran out of control. Oh well, what the hell.

I originally wrote this for a one page take-home final for sophomore English class. The unit was Things Fall Apart. This essay is obviously pretty leftist and it’s meant to be – my teacher was a diehard liberal. While I don’t necessarily agree with everything in this essay, I do think that the concept is interesting and writing nice enough to include on this blog.

Although the days of straightforward gunboat diplomacy and forcible colonization through military might have gone, this overt method of subjugating less developed countries for the benefit of the center has given away to one that is much more covert, and through its deceptiveness, much more effective. Thus, the unfortunate populaces of the periphery are ensnared and put even more so under the control of the powerful as the symbol of power changes from the sword to the dollar sign under the direction of 21^st Century Colonialism and as the worldwide hegemony flourishes.

The story of entrapment usually starts with a salesman, albeit not one in the individual sense. Instead, this salesman is usually a company, group of corporations, or in some cases, the international media. These scouts of the center usually enter the periphery selling one particular idea: that the developed world is marvelous and magnificent and that the periphery must try to become just like it in order to prosper in today’s international society. Although this idea does contain some truth, the aim of these expert trappers is not to be magnanimous, but instead to convince impoverished third world nations to take out loans from first world nations and then spend the money on large projects such as mines or dams that are theoretically smart investments which supposedly will later benefit the nation’s economy.

At the surface, it seems like a wonderful plan, one that can truly ignite a financial growth spurt in nascent nations. However, once the unwary commit to it there are a few problems. First, the peripheral nations usually are not technologically advanced enough to design the complex projects that they want to implement, so they have to contract foreign, first-world companies to help. Of course, these contractors cost money, a cost that is defrayed by the loans that were taken out to budget such projects in the first place- loans that were taken from developed nations. This means that not only is the center benefiting from the usury that accompanies such loans, but also that the money from said loans goes directly back to the center through the contracted, first-world corporations. The final hitch is that once the initial projects are completed, the periphery is already in so much debt that it must take out even more loans, or instead pay off its dues to foreign investors through land, mining, logging, and other methods, thus devastating the country by shipping its resources and money directly to other nations instead of distributing them within its own population.

The brilliance of this entire system and the fact that defines it as a hegemony is the willing subjugation by the oppressed as they strive to become “better”, as opposed to suppression by force. Thus, even though colonialism in the traditional sense is widely considered to be dead, its spectre still lives on in a form that is much better disguised and much more enticing than it was before.

To exit high school, all students in California must take and pass the California High School Exit Exam (CAHSEE). It’s obviously one of the most ennui-inducing tests ever an consists of a math section and an English section which is subdivided into multiple choice and an essay. I trolled the essay for fun, and I thought it was interesting enough to copy down and smuggle out on a piece of tissue paper. So, here it is.

The prompt was to write a letter to a new principal of our school to discuss our ideas for improvements.

Dear Mrs. Doe,

As part of an effort to create a democratic, student-oriented environment, or at least the illusion of one, you have asked the students to provide our opinions and ideas on select topics. This is, of course, a brilliant idea as we, the students, are all responsible, mature adults who would never dare to submit a facetious response. This having been said, there are several aspects of our school that if changed will unequivocally result in a better learning environment.

The first of my suggestions would be to do away with the notion of the state-initiated standardized test. Why? Well, standardized tests are always accompanied by bouts of severe cheating, meaning that they provide specious results that should not be trusted. Furthermore, we students also have to deal with enough extra-curricular tests such as the SAT. Giving the state the responsibility to administer said tests is nothing more than socialism, and we all know what we do with communists.

Now, perhaps I’m being a bit too harsh. I understand perfectly that you are just another pawn in the game that the real school administrators play. Therefore, I propose the idea that you immediately “abdicate” your positions and surrender your power to the student body. We are students, we go through the rigors of school every day, so therefore, we know what is best for ourselves. All we want is true democracy, equality, and communal possession of all school materials. We have been exploited through the application of tests and horrible cafeteria food for too long. The striated social structure of our school system must be systematically dismantled. The students of the world must unite for the final revolution!

Thus, you, the principal, have received the response that you’ve asked for. Although I seriously doubt that my requests will be considered, let alone granted, I will keep my hope. After all, a man once said “Hope is the opium of the people, the sigh of the oppressed.” I will keep this thought in my heart, this feeling in my mind. One day, even if I’m not here to see it, the international ideal will be achieved, and there will be peace.

Students of the world, unite!

Sincerely,

Karl McCarthy

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1336571/Terrorism-Can-really-stop-bomber-asking-Are-terrorist.html

Why are we always fighting our previous wars?