"Parasites" -- Michael J. Smith

Tweet

This article ripped directly off from: StopMeBeforeIVoteAgain

My man Doug Henwood is in fine form again today:

They’ve botched the stimulus, and they’re botching the financial rescue. They’re worse than I expected, and I wasn’t expecting much in the first place.

It has been an incredible thing to watch: the parties trotting out all the same tired cliches they've lived on for the last forty years or more, and stumbling zombielike through the sluggish, graceless tango of reciprocal posturing that's the only dance they know, while the country -- hell, the world -- is headed right down the toilet. Then finally,

Parturiunt montes, nascetur ridiculus mus!

The mountains travail and give birth to a mouse: this "stimulus" package, with its subsidies for hedge funds -- hedge funds! -- and for people who are still crazy enough to speculate in real estate.

It makes you wonder: Who's minding the store? And I think the answer is: No one, actually.

Times like this reveal a weakness in the picture that we Lefties tend of have of our society and its ruling elites. We imagine the commanding heights populated by shrewd, crafty, far-sighted strategists, the devoted servants of capital and empire, whose mission in life is to keep capital and empire afloat and thriving, and who will do whatever it takes to discharge that mission.

This picture is wrong. The brain of the body politic is not animated by such spirits. Rather it is infested with spirochetes, bloodworms, flukes, annelids, larvae, fungi, amoebae -- parasites, in short. Critters whose goal in life is not to keep their host organism alive, but to devour its tissues and secrete their toxins into its bloodstream.

Normally, the organism is healthy enough to carry a rather heavy parasite load. But a point arrives when the toxins build up. The mighty beast goes blind and deaf. It staggers. It drools. It startles at imaginary noises and finally blunders off a cliff.

Do the parasites care? They don't. They just want to keep their parasite party going, and enjoy their parasite lifestyle. If that means they have to chew into an important ganglion -- well, hell, dude, I'm a parasite. This is what I do.

Parasites are highly evolved but not very intelligent, in the ordinary sense of that term. They're excellently adapted for lodging themselves in the soft rich flesh of their host, and what they do, they do well. But their repertoire is sharply limited; and in particular, they have no capacity at all for understanding what is happening to their host, or how to keep their host alive even for their own benefit.

This fact explains the remarkable stupidity of what passed for "debate" over the stimulus program, and the staggering, unbelievable, world-historical stupidity of the final product. The spirochetes of Wall Street, and the hookworms of the Republican Party, and the liver flukes of the Democratic Party -- very much including Ali 'Bama and his band of Clintonite theives -- didn't do anything, couldn't do anything, but what they always do: gnaw away at their host's vital organs -- and secrete poison.