The two pillars of the current' American Way of Life' -work and individualism - have both shining and glaring contradictions. Though we today do the 24/7 work/consumption(and debt) routine, we are some of the laziest people on the planet outside of the job site(s). We work longer and have got fatter than the previous generation, and at the shopping mall - even in fair weather - witness the bipeds drive around the busy parking lot for 10 minutes just to find an open space that is close to the entrance ( once I watched this fat bitch - who nearly tagged my truck - in a BMW do this. I parked way back in the boon docks and hiked in in less than a minute. I walked in the door and noticed that she was still driving around searching for an opening, close-by. She finally made it in the store and I noticed that she had *Slim-Fast*products in her cart!); one spouse of a relative insists on driving to her job though she lives a mere two-blocks from it; the other day I opened the office door for a banshee who didn't want to make the effort to get her own key and walk back(she was the same distance from said office that I was;Banshee was on her way to the Athletic Club for a cardio, undoubtedly.) These are some subjective observations out of numerous....

As for individualism, Americans are the most Herd-like creatures - whilst they be Squares or think that they are part of the *Cool Ones* maximizing their individualism for all the world to see. I don't have much bones to pick with the Squares(Frat Boys/Chamber of Commerce/Stock Broker/Insurance racketeers, etc.) since most will fully admit that they are going along with the flow, playin' the Game, keeping up with Jones - it's these coffeehouse/hirsute/ purple or Ronald McDonald haired Roosters adorning themselves with fishing lures in their faces, thinking that having shit permanently engraved in their skin makes them really unique specimens in the known universe. Each their own - I'm keen on that. If people want to look like Walt Disney puked all over them, that's okay with me. If they have more pieces of metal in their faces, tongues and other body parts than I have in my fishing tackle box - bloody well n' good. What is the objection is that when such creatures somehow believe that they are non-conformists and that they're their own personal archetype of an *Individual*(just ask them). The negation is that they're merely conforming to a notion of non-conformity - doin' what their friend or some celebrity is doing;notice that these self-proclaimed individuals always run in packs, just like all other humans do. Those who confess that they just want to be 'Goth', 'Punk', Metal Face,HipHopper, Rastafarian(the Caucasian Dreadlocked bunch are particularly amusing to behold) neoHippie/neoBeatnik, whatever category - I respect them for being truthful. But don't give me any of this 'individuality' crap - they have little concept of it.

And few homo sapiens sapiens are true individuals/non-conformists - just like true Genius comes around once in a blue moon. Genuine article individuals are usually found in the NutHouse or they inhabit downtown streets and eat out of garbage cans(in the Middle Ages they were burned at the stake for being witches), and they can keep it. We're all Herd and social animals regardless how much persons deludes themselves thinking - "I'm a unique Individual and the sun personally revolves around Me!"

And Yanks are the most adroit cattle-grazers that there is. They know all about having&doing mind you, but speak on Being - you might as well be trying to converse in Swahili with them: just greet a colleague with "How are you being?" instead of 'How do you do?" and watch the momentary blank look on their countenances before they reply....

Post Labor Day Thoughts

A liquor store employer remarked to me and the other patrons in his store, last Saturday, that Labor Day is the day of 'not-to-work', but Americans with their Consumer Cult need for 24/7 service, no longer abide by this. He said that he would be damned if he was going to work on Labor Day, and neither were his employees. These are not the words of a labor unionist or socialist - he owns a small chain of liquor stores and seems to be quite well to do. He began as a mere grocery store clerk however, and obviously hasn't forgot what it means to be an employee.

Naturally, I put my two-cents in, and replied that first they took away May Day from the American Working Stiff, now they went to work on the first Monday in September; there are companies who don't even have Labor Day as a paid-holiday for their staff. Some - most Yanks - gasp that May Day is a 'Commie Holiday', and no red-blooded true American would observe it. Actually, May Day goes back to pagan times before Karl Marx&Co. were spermatozoa swimming in their daddies' MuleJuice. It's actually as American as Apple Pie: the first of May was one of the days that George Washington ordered the Continental Army to stand down when they were not in military engagements, for instance...

The fact is, that Yanks in the 21st Century work longer hours than at anytime in the 19th Century - the period that some erroneously view as the golden age of the Protestant Work Ethic. Some slave-driving American capitalists joke about the 'lazy bums' in places like France with their 35 hour work week(soon to abolished by Paris's NeoCon and laissez-faire Le Predator, Nicky Sarkozy?), yet the Frenchies today work longer than their grape-pickers in Alsace did in the Middle Ages. Our ancestors were 'slackers' in comparison to present times, but still we hear Old Foggies lamenting - " they sure knew how to WORK back in them thar days!" Yeah, they did. They worked their butts off via lack of technology, artificial lighting, but they also knew what leisure meant. The medieval peasant, the apprentice blacksmith, would not be employed at any company in the 21st Century because he would insist on having his holidays - which were more numerous than those today. And from what we know about the sociology of the Working Stiff in the 13th Century, it appears that they largely kept their own hours and were not regimented to a defined daily punch-in and out. Many have this image of the Feudal Lord standing over his Manor occupants cracking the whip; though feudalism was a form of slavery,the Lords actually seemed to have been loose, lackadaisical bosses - just as long as they got their cut from the crops and whatnot that their peasants toiled over to bring in. Their workday, as an aggregate whole, probably didn't extend much over five hours - yet civilization continued. Thus, the 24/7, three-jobs, 48hour + a week Consumer/ Work Cult today is more indicative of decline than that of social benevolence...

Even when Americans are off from their jobs come Labor Day, many spend it working about their houses and whatnot( as they do come their summer vacations and leave - if they have vacations, that is.) Even those who utilize their granted holidays and leaves, they remark that they'd had rather been working and didn't know what to do with themselves when granted leisure, even if it is paid; humans that spend their weekends not doing something, are often derisively regarded as 'loafers' by these above robotic workaholic creatures - even if the loafers are punching a clock consistently during the week, and have a dedicated ethos on the Job. I personally know people who would rather work than to fuck, for that matter - "..sorry, Miss Penthouse Pet of the Year, I gotta get to my third job at the Convenience Store!" Maybe I exaggerate here, but I wonder about some of these guys who slave-drive themselves(?)

Another thing that is deeply annoying are these workaholics who complain that they haven't time for their Families and maybe they should downsize their worship of the Protestant Work Ethic. The fact is that they don't even know their *family*(they're always working, how could they?), and would undoubtedly end up in divorce, wife-beating and child abuse if they were in the situation to "spend time with my family". If one is truly into *Family Values* they would had tried to fathom a way that they could work less, anyway. But they actually think that Family dedication is having things to keep up with the Joneses and the latest gadget trends. This has become the true-blue American concept of Family, so workaholics had better not cry on my shoulders about their neglected families - spouse & the biped spawn from their loins are mere possessions for them. I once played the workaholic game, time to time, but I learned to grow-up out of it.

And I don't work at a goddamn thing on Labor Day, either, and I'd probably shoot the person who tried to coerce me to work that day.

Ode to Ike; the Zen of Golf

Critics of Consumer Cult Critics(yours truly) always state that we want every American to become Silas Marners, live in hovels and don sackcloth for clothing as we count our money stowed away in coffee cans. Far from that! Actually, what I personally envision is close to what we had in the 1950s when Papa Ike was running the Show: we had our gadgets, a car in every garage but Yanks had Savings accounts,also. 'What is Above, is Below'(again). President Eisenhower, people must remember, was a true *fiscal conservative*( not a fake one like most GOPers are presently): Ike looked on everything in the Budget with a administrative accountant's eye - including the Pentagon. There was nothing of this later gnosticism of Reagan about him that somehow, over-spending on Defense is not detrimental to the health of the Budget, but domestic spending is wasteful and inflationary. Eisenhower had the horse sense to know that the Cold War would ultimately bankrupt us, and Ike had wisdom. That is why following the death of Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles - Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz couldn't hold a candle to that bastard - Eisenhower began pursing the policy of detente' with the USSR and hence, his famous Farewell Address warning Americans of the 'military-industrial complex'. We didn't listen to Ike and we got what we have now. Eisenhower, one of the architects of the NATO alliance, admonished incoming President John F. Kennedy in January of 1961 that the time had come for the United States to gradually disengage from this military alliance. You know, Ike was a Five Star General, and if anyone in that period and thereafter had a grasp of military entanglements, the pluses and minuses, it was him.

Contrary to the belief of Adlai Stevenson democrats, Ike did much more in his eight years in the Executive Office than play friggin' Golf. This is what an Adlai Stevenson liberal, Fred Greenstein, demonstrated in his book about the statecraft of Eisenhower, The Hidden Hand Presidency. Eisenhower cultivated the public persona of a smiling face with a five-iron, the optimistic panache that everything was Okay. He looked and acted like anyone's benevolent Grandpa. Nixon in later life remarked that America had no idea that behind the scenes, Ike had a devious streak(Nixon should know all about that); off the Golf Course, Eisenhower burned a lot of midnight oil and this was all part of his asymmetrical rule, his refusal to engage personalities directly. Like George Washington, Eisenhower wanted to appear above politics. Privately, he'd call in Cabinet members and slap wrists when need be, dress them down like the old General that he was. Few knew the ends and outs of bureaucracy like he did. Let's face it: the man held the Allied Coalition together in WW2, and no other general from either side could had done it. Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, who seldom gave anyone besides Bernard Montgomery praise, admitted as such. The key to Ike and his commanding respect is that when he gave his Word - it was gold. His famous Grin was genuine, but hell hath no fury when one crossed Ike and got his dander raised. Eisenhower had a fierce temper that he kept cloaked from the public, but it was like a sudden thunderstorm, and he was not one to carry long-term grudges against someone. Many people say that 'hate is not part of my vocabulary'(some of these types are some of the most prolific haters, actually), and this is true of Eisenhower. Nixon, his Vice President - no stranger to hatred - remarked that Ike had no concept of the term and didn't understand it. Ike was both a responsible statesman and also a benevolent human being - rare in the political arena.

Dwight D. Eisenhower had his faults and big ones like anyone. He listened to Dulles too much and actually enabled the growth of the military-industrial complex/National Security State by looking the other way on CIA shenanigans in Iran, Guatemala and elsewhere. The Domino Theory was erroneous. But his finest hour was in 1956 when he refused to directly engage the USSR over Hungary and in no uncertain terms he told the British-French-Israeli tag team on the Suez Canal to back-off - such prevented the USA-USSR from going to nuclear war and ending human civilization. The John Birch Society called Ike a 'Communist' because he didn't think that turning the Earth into a radioactive crater was a good idea. Go figure, consider the source....

As I previously remarked to my virtual friend, Howard J. Harrison, over at 'The Economic Nationalist', the 1950s under Papa Ike was perhaps the last decade of the 'American System' economics - even with the antithesis of Bretton Woods: internal improvements(the Interstate/Autobahnen Plan), fiscal responsibility;Ike believed in Carey's harmony of interests as well. Eisenhower admired rich industrialists and brought some of them into his Administration, and they are those he cultivated as golfing partners. But unlike 'Republicans' today, Ike accepted the social-market of the New Deal and thought those who wanted to destroy the social-safety net were correctly, STUPID! Not that he was a Guns n' Butter liberal either - Ike was at heart a conservative and spoke in nostalgia and wistfully of small-town America, like Abilene, Kansas that he grew up in, and he was a firm believer and practitioner of the old Protestant Work Ethic. Yet, he knew that not everyone could enjoy the benefits of this, and some people were born with strikes against them that they could not overcome. Again, noblesse oblique. Eisenhower was neither a Calvin Coolidge nor a Great Society patron. Out of all the post WW2 presidents of the USofA, Ike came the closest to finding the Synthesis in national economic policy.....

The reader must know that I am a bit bias since like Ike(no pun), I am also a Kansan. Visiting his Presidential Library in Abilene is like a pilgrimage site that Roman Catholics have to Lourdes and Rome. He's the Sunflower State's Guy that rose above the detrimental reputation of 'Hayseeds &Methodists'( coined by that bigoted, classist slug, Free Market Bolshevik & Nazi sympathiser - HL Mencken) and made good in the realm of the City Slickers, and he was the best that Kansas ever produced for the United States of America in the political arena - Bob Dole could not shine Ike's shoes, because Bob Dole lacked the certain essential ingredient that Ike had - Great-Souled Man.

Few Presidents could look the Founding Fathers in the eye and say that they passed muster. Dwight D. Eisenhower was one who could, and he would smile when he said it.....

Bush's Solution for every economic malfunction: cut taxes. Dean Baker at 'Beat the Press' does a fine job demonstrating that the Shrub's plan to help Americans suffering from the foreclosure epidemic is not only empty symbolism, but stupidity. Of course, the wealthy who over-extended themselves in real estate speculations will benefit the most. Another classic case of the OverClass's assault on the American Dream - that every citizen can 'build a home where the buffalo roam' - is now getting to be just that.....

Glad that College Football Season is commencing, this Saturday! It should be a civic Holy Day. The NFL does not quite have the 'soul' as football does at the University level; anymore I could care less who gets to the Super Bowl come next February.....

"My Country, Right or Wrong - still my Country." I'm down with that and always have been. Yet Americans generally lack the ability or desire to look into the mirror - especially those who they elect to public office(s). When any citizen takes issue with the detrimental general behavior of their fellow Americans, the imperial hubris of foreign and defense policy craftsmen, the NeoCon lobby always screams that such an analytical citizen is some American-hating Leftist, a 'Fifth Columnist'(?), or some other label. If Americans forget that they are all-too-human like anyone else, how can we ever know when our Country is in the right direction??.....

'What is Above, is Below' - This is another thing that Europe still in part retains whilst Americans have lost the concept of, or never really had - the duality of the macrocosm/microcosm. My fellow Yanks scratch their heads when the totality of Being is discussed;instead we Americans have a worldview of have and do, and think that having and doing something is segregated from the so-called 'great chain of Being'. This is why post WW2 Existentialism never caught on much on this side of the Pond except in academic or bohemian circles; for allegedly being so 'modern', Existentialism is broadly a continuation of the old medieval macrocosm/microcosm interaction, though with heavier emphasis on the micro- individual's role in this. We are supposed to be such individualists here in the USofA, yet we lack the spiritual essence within existence , and often dismiss any heady discussions of Being as gobbly-goop - we got the wrong verbs as guidance, that's why.Finger-pointing? Yup, a man named John Locke - America's 18th Century Enlightenment patron philosopher - for starters...

Spenglerian 'second-religiousness' doesn't apply to spirituality: religion is often divorced from spirit and often have no correlation. If/when we go down the commode, it will be because the spirituality of the macro/microcosm is out of whack, regardless of how many Americans attend church on Sunday to beat the Bible and make some lazy-assed shyster preacher or priest, well-to-do. A total atheist is often more spiritual than your token orthodox true-believer and less susceptible to experience what we in the US has, from Top to Bottom, spiritual death. Even if every American fills the church pews come Sunday morning, it shan't make a bit of difference and hold back the Fall of our own creation(?).....

Was going to do a sarcastic piece on Larry Craig and the Party of *Family Values*(GOP) but anyone can read about it anywhere else, and the writer will probably do a better job of it....

This is to inform any reader that for the time being, posting here will be less frequent. I am in the abyss of redundancy and it is getting difficult to spin any post regarding Free Trade, Protectionism, etc., where I do not wax like some Dittohead merely repeating what His Fat Hypocriteness, Rush Limbaugh( I know.. Mikey Moore is fatter and he recently did a health-care movie.Not seeing it.),spews out daily - which are the same things he said the day before, and before, and before....

Not that Left-Federalist has thrown in the towel, and I'll probably utilize this blog space for unrelated topics; I'm just as earnest on the core issues discussed here as ever. I've not hit a block, but a broken record, and it's time to turn it off for a bit. Unlike Limbaugh, I'm not getting paid to be repetitious, and other things require my attention in this thing called existence......

Another thing that has contributed to the demise of American Working Class culture is that no longer is Joe Six Pack paid for his blood, sweat and tears, weekly. 'TGIF' used to have more significance in that the Blue Collar guy could look forward to getting his wages - now he usually has to wait biweekly for them, and like myself, he is oft not paid on a Friday. Who killed Friday PayDays? I have this theory that a long time ago in a drone mill or factory in Anytown, USA, some lazy accountant who was swapping spit with the Boss convinced him that if payroll was done only twice a month, their beautiful special relationship would only get better. Hence, the meme was passed down to all the lazy personnel in payroll at companies everywhere and it has become adopted, almost everywhere.

It's bad enough that the corporate overclass has to bust up unions, buy off politicians for passage of *Right to (screw) Work(ers)* laws - they then attacked the general morale of the workin' stiff by taking away the joy of all Fridays. Feature that many people do not earn enough to properly budget(what's that?) their earnings in the first place, and this biweekly business throws another wrench into it. And whoever came up with the idea of 'rotating shifts' - that messes up an employee's biological clock - needs to be tarred&feathered, beat with in an inch of his life, then shipped off in a cargo hold full of big rats and presented to trial at the Hague for crimes against humanity.......

[Also I have this other conspiracy theory about something else: shyster divorce lawyers at some conference in the 1990's were lamenting that since more normal heterosexual couples have opted to just shack-up instead of going through the traditional ritual of pair-bonding - they decided to push this Gay Marriage bit to drum up more business . Given that infidelity is the #1 cause of marital breakups, and male homosexuals are the most promiscuous out of all genders of sexual orientations - divorce lawyers could then clean-up at court. What a bloody racket!]

Spiegel Online has a cooing article regarding Ukraine's economic 'boom' and between the lines said article insinutes that said GNP growth is because of laissez-faire policies - "politics is politics, business is business". Certainly the Free Market Bolsheviks at the Cato Institute have picked up on this info and are strutting about with chub-ons. Well, a time will come shortly that they will need Viagra to maintain them: Ukraine still has its old industrial base which as we know, hard- industry is the key for economic growth and without some form of dirgist public planning, booms will ultimately go bust. Ukraine also has a growing service sector which is anthema to industry and sets out to rob the labor force;if some checks are not put on said service sector, and if Ukraine does not protect its industrial base, watch them slide into Americanization. That Ukraine also has a growing speculative force should be reason for Kiev to have yellow lights flashing now. Plus, the Spiegel article lauds the growing consumerism of Ukrainians. Really now, the last thing that a growing national-economy needs is to adopt the USA's Consumer Cult! Ukrainians should be saving instead of spending on Mickey Mouse gadgets. Yeah, I know that they were deprived of their toys under the horrible, central-planned Leninist State economy of the USSR, but going full-throttle in the other direction is not the answer. Look what happened to us Yankees here, Ukrainians, and learn: autocratic State Socialism isn't the answer, and neither is the neofeudalism of globalist laissez-faire.....

Morris Berman loves to point out how the materialist, hedonistic Consumer Cult has robbed Americans of their soul, yet he omits the role that his side has played in this. Though I don't think that Berman is a cultural-Bolshevik himself, he is a man of the Left, and the Frankfurt School import here was anything but good in post-WW2, USA. But Berman is on par that America as the beacon of liberty was from its inception based on negative freedom: we held liberty as against something else instead of for. But Berman's criticisms of America does not have the hue of his Leftist counter-parts like Howard Zinn and Michael -'let's not pick on Stalin'-Parenti( as I'd love to time-warp Holocaust Deniers to Auschwitz, circa 1944, same applies to Gulag Deniers like Parenti - a logging camp on 600 calories per day in 1930s Arctic Siberia would do him nicely.) and he acknowledges that America was once a good idea and the Federalists of the Early Republic were the real Menschen of classical-republican virtue and retained that benevolent aristocratic meme of organic Europa melded to said 'small-r' republicanism. Berman rightfully blames the Jeffersonians for mucking all of this up, when usually Lefties coo over the Jacobin world-view of TJ. Neither does Berman champion the meme of full-fledged participatory democracy, and he grasps in his own wording what is needed in a healthy society of a nation is a harmony of interests between the Few and the Many - not leveling from either/or. The Few have leveled the USA by hyper individualism in the name of laissez-faire. But a negative harmony does exist : the Many keep voting these cruds in to rule them, or they don't even care to go to the ballot box to do so. The excuse that there is a case of no real alternative, and why should the Commons even bother to vote, rings hollow. Many times in American election history we have had third parties on the ballot that was an alternative to the Demo-Repub duopoly, but few have ever made more than a sharp splash with the voting population. For instance, in 2000 we had alternatives both on the Left and Right(Nader/Buchanan) to Gore and the Shrub - two that few were enthusiastic about and they were roughly the same species - but how many voted for either two of the named alternatives? The excuse that voting for a third party candidate is "wasting your vote" is stupid( as if voting for some corrupt dummkopf that a voter doesn't like isn't wasting a ballot). This is exactly what the Demo-publican party-power structure wants the voter to think, and it works, apparently.
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Notice how Americans with their cult of individualism are actually herd-like within it: they all indulge their consumerist hedonism based on what their neighbor has, or what some cool&trendy celebrities and other aspiring criminals are doing and wearing. For instance, this current tattoo craze originates from that one of the Beautiful People, somewhere, decided to get a Tat one night when drunk, and then subsequently the Sheep were standing in line at the Tattoo Parlor, bleating to get their wool adorned with, (cough) body art.

Many other examples exist on how conformist and collectivist Americans truly are despite their 'rugged individualism', and they have the individualism/communitarian dichotomy in all the wrong places, flip-flopped back asswards.