As The Omnivore continues to reflect on the events of last Wednesday, some things are becoming clearer--but nothing is actually totally clear. Still, these are sign-posts and metaphors-made-new-flesh (long live the new flesh!) and we should pay attention to them as this develops as rapidly as anything this historic can.
What is The Omnivore talking about?
1. We All Got It Commin'
The Insurrectionist riot was something our country as a whole has built, coddled, and gestated for 12 years starting with Sarah Palin being favored by the GOP base over McCain and then birthed with Trump. We were not all complicity--no: but as a country our organs tolerated the cancer as it grew and spread.
"Don't anger the cancer," said the GOP. "It doesn't want to be treated and we need it."
"Don't show a strong bias," said the news media, being constantly accused of having a ginormous bias, "we have to report on this administration . . . fairly."
Narrator's voice: "They did a shitty job of reporting on it fairly along almost any dimension."
Our Social Media giants allowed the lies to spread: Republicans were totally allowed to lie on Facebook--they fought for that--won--and are now upset about it. QAnon flourished and grew even as alarmed observers (Reddit) tried to purge it, the nature of the Internet not only routed around many of the bans but concentrated the survivors in hyper-radicalization areas like VOAT.
Organs like Instagram filtered out most of the bat-shit content and created "pastel QAnon" for women in Yoga and to appeal to bro-science gurus fighting vaccines. The Save-The-Children nonsense roped in well meaning women involved in education. The deluge of From-The-White-House lies about mountains of evidence of stolen data has convinced even educated people something was badly wrong.
Arguments were honed by guys like Ted Cruz and at every level of authority to the Resolute Desk itself lies were told that ordinary people could be forgiven for taking at face value.
We built this--even as some of us tried to tear it down--we have to understand that we are all part of the same social organism. The #Resistance acts as a disease--but it cannot afford to kill the host.
So here we are. We are Americans. We own a piece of it.
2. The Vaccine Coup
As we roll out the vaccine for COVID--a possible game changer from our national pandemic--there is another vaccine that we have been subjected to: a really stupid coup attempt. Now, even bad, dumb coup attempts can damage the country such that the next coup succeeds. There's history for this, Trust The Omnivore.
But: History ain't guaranteed either. This has exposed a truth about the GOP and the lies that would not have been extant if we had gone along to get along. The lies are dangerous. The intent is vile. The support from the top is treasonous if not technically legally, morally.
People who were otherwise considering complaints an over-reaction have had to rethink things (in some cases) and it turns out that a still-born dead coup attempt may actually help to immunize us against the next harder core coup attempt (see: Ted Cruz's nocturnal emission dreams). We came close to seeing law makers executed on live-stream and it has mobilized our organic defenses in ways that, literally, have not been seen in modern times.
Maybe this helped.
3. The Vaccine of Babble
In the biblical tale of the Tower of Babble, man exceeds his reach in building the tall tower and God responds by splintering us so we no longer understand each other. It appears the tower then gets destroyed by lightning.
That's kinda over kill, really.
In the case of the real vaccine, we built an amazing "tower." The rapid production of a vaccine in the pretty realistic movie Contagion was considered, by experts, "too fast--but it's a movie, so hey." In real life? The Omnivore thinks we beat the movie.
If COVID was sent by God as, you know, a wake up call then our boffins have built a tower and it probably ticked him off!
So now we all speak different languages ("the micro-chip! The DNA re-write! I'mma eat hotdogs--but WAT IS IN THE VACCINE!??") and we have chaos in the deployment. The problem? This didn't take any act of God. We fucking Babeled ourselves.
Even COVID is shaking its head in shame.
4. So What Happened?
Well, it seems apparent that the militias would need more balls than they have to storm Washington on the 20th with a ton of National guard there. So either we get cucked grousing on low-rent social media . . . or we get various state-house assaults and shit that we're also ready for. The Omnivore is pretty sure that FBI guys are infiltrating a lot of these movements and, despite what they think, faking being a MAGA is easy. Talk tough, do nothing, listen for someone who sounds like they might have some potential.
Maybe the coup vaccine worked--and we're still gonna be babeling on the real one. But let us not the irony:
The MAGAts are affeared that the vaccine will implant a tracking microchip in them! I turns out? They were all carrying a tracking microchip and due to Parler's idiotic security, the data dump tracked them into the capitol.
we live in an age of miracles and wonders.
Maybe this is the long-distance wake-up call.
Dropping quite a few pop-culture refs there, Ommie! Videodrome? Unforgiven? “The Boy in the Bubble”?
ReplyDeleteI agree that one of the enduring lessons of donk_enby’s massive Parler data-scrape ought to be how not to implement a public-facing API. Extra points, I guess, for finally understanding why Google and Twitter routinely strip geolocation metadata from uploaded photos and videos.
I also agree that we all own some of this fiasco, and that Walt Kelly”s Pogo had it right years ago: “We have found the enemy, and they is us.”
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I feel *seen* on the Video Drome reference! We all own some of it. But some own more than others. I'm writing about that next.
DeleteAh yes. 1983, about 15 years before Jimmy W. hardened into a right-wing nutjob. I used to respect that guy, too. Too bad.
ReplyDeleteBut thanks to Family Guy, we all know he’ll follow a trail of candy wherever it may lead...
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