Persons Who Need Persons

The recent Supreme Court ruling affirming the personhood of corporations (Georgie Orwell had a farm, ee-i-ee-i-uh-oh …) should force Fortune Magazine to rename its annual list – if for no reason other than to demonstrate a real commitment to journalistic accuracy – to 500 Lousy Moneygrubbing Cocksucking Assholes Who Make the Subversion of Our Democracy the Only American Dream Worth Dozing Towards.

But what else should people expect when they devise a value system that is accumulative (i.e., capitalism) and then ask it to live in competition with the fixed value of human worth?   So long as capital is permitted the job of determining not only how a person survives in the world, but if he survives in the world, then the meaning of life can only be about accounting and not about accountability.  Within mathematics, there are no fraternal twins of equal value.

That said, it always amazes me that such legislative criminality, such as was demonstrated by the January 21st Citizens United vs. FEC ruling, can be perpetrated in broad daylight and not send everybody running into the streets with pitchforks, torches and chants to Kill the Monster!

The truth of the matter is that I can never find the logic in blaming the monster for acting like a monster. There are no vegan vampires.

On the contrary, more often than not I find myself railing against the ineptitude of those who call themselves watchdogs.  Mostly, I blame the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, whose job I’ve always been told was to organize popular opinion away from the treachery of self-aggrandizement as celebrated by our burgeoning plutocracy.  (I go into that, specifically, at great length here.)

In fact, I once went to a Move On rally mounted in protest of George Bush’s veto of a 2007 bill hoping to expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) and explained my aforementioned contempt to my journal like this:

I arrived at the train station at 5:25, five minutes before the demonstration was officially set to begin, a candlelit vigil I was told, and I found a seat on the wide lip of one of the several enormous concrete planters that polka dotted the landing where the underground station emptied beneath a huge orange awning the size of a band shell at street level.  Ten feet away from me stood two Move On organizers trying to recruit a pair of Awake! Jesus freaks into the protest, imploring them to put down their magazines and to pick up one of the fifty stacked cardboard signs leaning against an adjacent planter and to spend the next few hours standing curbside with it, waving it solemnly at traffic.

Mimicking the uncomfortable no thank you shown to them several thousand times a day, the Jesus freaks moved on, leaving a total of four people to begin the event.

Sighing audibly, the protestors grabbed their baffling signs – HONK FOR KIDS, BE A VETO BANDIDO, WE THE PEOPLE JUST SAY NO and one that was on a piece of cardboard no bigger than a standard sized piece of typing paper with lettering that had been drawn with a ballpoint pen – and shuffled over to where the cars were whizzing by as impenetrable as 5000 pound seeds in pursuit of soil.

In twenty minutes the mob of activists had swelled to seven people, two of whom were under five, one of them crying in her stroller because she’d been swatted for chewing on her sign.  Thirty-feet beyond the seven was a Move On photographer who was taking pictures of the demonstration, his shutter snapping just at the moment when somewhere around a hundred bone-tired commuters would exit the train station and crowd around the sign holders to wait for the walking green at the enormous crosswalk on Lankershim before continuing their commute on the other side of the road at the bus station.  Then the light would change, the camera would be recapped and the hoard, comprised of faces that looked as if the sign-carriers were oozing something that might stain their clothes, would slide away from the miniscule number of protestors like sand being poured from a public ashtray leaving gum wads anchored where they stood.

“Get out of our way!  Get out of our way!” hollered a man with widely spaced corn kernels for teeth and a limp severe enough to require airplane arms to help him keep his balance.  He was headed toward the protesters, in the opposite direction of the commuters, and had noticed the Move On folks with their signs and assumed the hippies had taken over the world and he was speaking for all who hadn’t yet been corrupted by empathy and optimism.

“Anti-American sons-a-bitches!” he spat, on his way home, I guessed, to piss in the sink and to slurp dinner from the fistful of ketchup packets that he’d been warming over in his pocket since mid-afternoon, the notes that make up the refrain from God Bless America circling round and round inside his head like vultures.

Just before the demonstration broke up, a little more than an hour from when it started, having never gotten either dark enough for candles or remained quite bright enough for camaraderie, I watched as one of the remaining three protestors left his curbside position for a daring final attempt to incite some support for the humanism that he and his comrades were hoping to stir in defiance of Bush’s veto.  Walking across the plaza with the deliberation of Jesus Christ moving towards the comfort of his cross, the man stopped at the top of the escalator leading up from the train platform below and hoisted his gigantic HONK FOR HEALTHY KIDS sign above his head, confident that he’d be impossible for the unwashed masses emerging from the underground to miss.

He stood there for fifteen minutes unable to get a single honk out of anybody, his face souring and his eyes communicating a real disdain for humanity’s inability to see what was right in front it.