You know, I actually dislike this statement I made immensely. What excites me about the strikes has nothing to do with Schadenfreude towards Republican lawmakers. What I said was even a lie - I haven't heard a Republican say anything about the strikes at all. I just presumed they had.
What I really dislike is Republican work-yourself-to-death-for-nothing ideology. Mainstream Republican ideology is toxic. It's a religion, a religion that encourages self-sacrifice to your boss (God) in return for the chance (judgment of God) to enter heaven (get a promotion). It encourages self-repression. It hates artists, freedom, dangers. It wants one thing and one thing only: people who are cattle, people who maximize goods produced at the least possible cost.
Republican lawmakers everywhere preach this religion. This religion that's 100%
exactly the same in function as
health and wealth scams. It all functions on the same promise: keep giving to
me, you slave, you servant, and by faith, you
too shall receive! But you must maintain your faith, you must keep giving, and moreover
cull any desires in yourself that work against our religion. Make yourself
weak for me. Donate yourself
to me.
These Republican lawmakers - the lickspittles and sycophants of capital - are the only purely religious group left. The religion of selfishness through selflessness.
What I love about these wildcat strikes is the negation of a toxic ideology - it's an expression of true freedom. These people no longer feel the need to obey the strictures of the work-will-set-you-free religion. This strike is
actual freedom, they're zoo animals who have escaped their cage and are roaming free, they are
improved as human beings. Just think about it - would you ever say that a zoo animal, tamed from nature, obedient to human beings, is an
improvement over its wild self? Yet we fail to see the same is true of human beings.
Yet, the opposite is true of Trump supporters and people who still care at all about anything Clinton does. Blaming others, fixating everything on the grievances caused by another, is resentment, it's toxic to oneself and dangerous to others. Trump supporters are the same as the proto-Nazi antisemites of 19th century Germany. If you don't believe me, go read about Wagner,
Die Meistersinger and its reception. The opera is about a young Aryan man, Hans Sachs, who wins over the support of his Aryan community to exile and humiliate the very-Jewish-seeming Beckmesser in a singing competition, and a message about the supremacy of German art and the need to protect it from "foreign influence". Oh, and the year after Wagner updated his tract "Jewishness in Music", one of the key texts in formulating German antisemitism of the day. The message of
Die Meistersinger is the fundamental Nazi one - the awful Jews are holding the superior race back and we need to be rid of them to be happy. Also, Mexicans are rapists, and cartels are destroying our communities. These are the real problems in America to Trumpists, it has nothing to do with our devout religious practices, and slavish attitudes towards capital and work.
And the Democratic Party is suing Trump, Russia and Wikileaks now. Go turn on Ellen DeGeneres sometime, or any one of the Trump-Russia obsessed outlets. You'll see a similarly toxic (but less outright dangerous) form of radical resentfulness - a belief that America's fundamental problems are foreign ones, and that if we purged the right people, we'd be free from this problem. It's a toxic obsession.
So what I'm saying is - I'm a huge supporter of these strikes because they're
not any of this. It's not about resentment, the strikes say, "I desire something", they don't say, "I desire
not them", which is the messaging you hear elsewhere. It's about people using their strength to their advantage and impressing their will on the world without making it zero-sum.
And that's why I like it. So apologies for making it about Republicans - Republicans aren't really worth talking about, what's worth talking about is how cool things can be once people toss off their dumbass religious beliefs about work and capital - what exciting new avenues will open up when we have made ourselves free.
