The Beauty of Obama’s Clapper Appointment

As you’ve probably heard, Obama has appointed James Clapper (the man who lied under oath to Congress about NSA spying) to review NSA spying.

I am in awe, few things have impressed me this deeply.

This isn’t just a middle finger to everyone to everyone who is against blanket surveillance (aka. the majority of Americans), it is Obama saying “Kiss My Ass.”

It’s really hard for most people to understand just how much contempt our lords and masters have for us. They really don’t give a fuck what’s good for us, what we like, or what we think. They are rich, or powerful, or famous because they deserve it, and if we aren’t any of those things then they don’t give two fucks what we think. By not being rich, powerful or famous we have proven we don’t deserve any say. After all, if we had any qualities that were worthwhile beyond the sort of qualities you praise in a dog, we wouldn’t be peons, would we.

In this, Obama is very similar to Bush, actually, but in general it’s a characteristic of everyone near the top of our current society. Starting at about the Senior VP level, people decide that they deserve everything they’ve got and everyone else doesn’t. If they did, they’d have it.

The media is full of studies showing that power decreases empathy, and I’ll bet that’s true throughout history. But I’ll also bet this, the degree to which it is true is social, and in many times and places it has been less true. Over the last couple generations we’ve seen a significant, measurable fall in the general level of empathy in the population as a whole. If you have an ideology which glorifies greed and which claims that society is a meritocracy when there is copious evidence to the contrary, those who win will believe they “deserve” what they have, and everyone else “deserves” what they have. Add to that objective circumstances which amount to dog-eat-dop (there simply are not enough good jobs to go around) and people will either band together, or turn on each other. Generally, we’ve chosen, for ideological reasons, to turn on each other.

This isn’t necessary: it isn’t what happened in the US in the Great Depression, for example. It’s a choice, and our choice is to be bastards to each other.