I, Loudmouth

I stopped writing this blog a couple of years ago. There has been this growing dislike within the zeitgeist for the internet troll, against the flameout that disrupts civil discussion. It gave me pause. I became increasingly uncomfortable at the prospect of being labeled as one of “those guys.” This blog also didn’t seem to go with all the other things I was doing. Would being the Asshole of the Century stop me from getting my poetry published? Would it cause a potential employer to balk at offering me a job? I felt the pressure to tone it down, to become civil.

So I shut up. But no more.

My return to this blog was probably first predicated by my decision to leave Facebook, with its little tribes of like-minded folks shunning those they find disagreeable. It no longer feels right to have the parameters of my outbursts dictated by the consensus of a community of my supposed friends. We’ve reached the point where the fate of the world is too important to step aside and let it be decided by the folks already drinking the Kool-Aid.

Disruption has become not just an act of personal defiance. It is a civic duty. We are in the process of becoming Rome, where a ruling class placates the masses with a program of bread and circuses that serve to distract us from the fact we have almost no say in the future of our country, our planet, our families, or our posterity. In this context, it is imperative to speak my peace without concern for whom I might offend.    

Democracy is on the precipice, with a handful of billionaires having an outsized influence on the body politic, and a self-appointed meritocracy works against the interests of most of the American people. The school system emasculates our children, spending most of its energy training them to be a cross between a trained monkey and a computer, programmed to conform while efficiently completing a mundane series of tasks. Culture has increasingly turned into entertainment, tinged with a dose of brainwashing, as our world revolves around our smartphones and a well-crafted fiction that is accepted as given. There is very little impetus to rock the boat, the goal of the enlightened class being the process of learning from other enlightened people what enlightened people should think. Conformity is enforced even as the culture tears itself apart, as opposing sides seek their own consensus. In such a world, thinking for yourself is not just a revolutionary act but a public gift, albeit one not likely to be appreciated by others.   

Even most of today’s music, the creative art I believed held the secret to the human heart, increasingly means nothing. Listening to the radio feels like it is 1974 all over again. The production studio is once again the locus of creativity, and the songs, to the degree they are about anything at all, run the long but narrow gamut from loud declarations by the latest cock-of-the-walk to bathetic moans of personal lament. The difference being that the nadir of the 1970’s was a fairly narrow moment in time, whereas the current sonic purgatory shows no signs of abating.  

So The Asshole of the Century writes again. I will be holding court on a range of subjects in the coming weeks, from politics to culture, education to race relations.

I’m a loudmouth, baby. Try and shut me up.