Be Careful Out There.

 

About 40 years ago, I realized I had made a big "world-view-level" mistake. 

I was born in 1957. You could argue that was the "golden age" of a-merkin liberalism. After 300 years, the nation was beginning to start to slowly to attempt to undo the huge horrors of our historic racism and concomitant adherence to white supremacy. The gap between rich and poor was being narrowed. Progressive programs like the GI Bill were funded and in full-swing. Housing was being built and was affordable. Upward mobility was not rare and anomalous and reserved only for the children of those who Theodore Roosevelt called the "malefactors of great wealth."

In 1957, the top .1-percent of amerikans earned 10-percent of all income.
Today that percentage earns about 25-percent of all income.

If the population were 1000, and total income were $1000,
in 1957 the top one person earned $100.  Today that one person earns $250.

All those things were happening and a million more. So many, to my eyes, positives that despite backlash and little "blips" like Vietnam, I grew up believing liberalism was the normal course of human events. As Dr. King once said, I believed "that the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

In my old age perhaps my outlook, often as dark as a Hasid's closet at midnight, has dimmed. The current political sump has further darkened my world view. It's hard to find a flicker of hope.

I've come to realize that the period I was born in was perhaps anomalous. And the world we're living in now, which in Thomas Hobbes' words about life in the Middle Ages, life on our planet will be "nasty, brutish and short."

A close-up of tumpism in practice.
Appropriately enough, those marks look like nazi runes.

I'm reading now, or slogging through, the book pasted above. It's a long history of the universal practice of slavery, cruelty and subjugation that most westerners know very little about. 

As Marozzi points out, for every one-hundred books about the Atlantic slave-trade and slavery in the "west," only one book has been written about slavery in the "east."

That disparity despite these facts:

All that has led me to think about things I'd rather not think about. 

We all grew up believing "freedom" and "human rights" and "no kings" were our norm. 

Maybe we were wrong.  Maybe they are anomalous. 

Maybe this is normal:

Who's riding you?

And if you've ever wondered why about 75-percent of agency creatives are freelance and the average tenure of a creative at a holding company agency is about the length of the lifespan of a mayfly (Dolania Americana has the shortest adult lifespan of any mayfly: the adult females live for less than five minutes) consider this:

And then consider this:

And then this, by Voltaire:

In all this, here's the part that semiotically squeezed my scrotum.

For most of the last eight-to-ten thousand years--since humans started settling in cities, adopting agriculture, amassing surpluses and a powerful "noble" class has emerged, those nobles have subjugated the peasants.

More painfully, tens of thousands of girls and women, hundreds of thousands, were institutionalized rape victims, being trafficked into slavery and kept as concubines under a regimen of systemic rape and captivity. Tens of thousands of boys and men--hundreds of thousands--were castrated and made eunuchs--between ten and ninety percent of those being severed died afterwards. Many many thousands for many thousands of years lived on ball-less-ly.

It wasn't unusual for a minor potentate to have a harem of 4,000 girls and women. Harem is politesse for "sex slaves." Also, it wasn't unusual to have an army of 10,000-100,000 male eunuchs. That's slaves who the "state" castrated. 

We weren't the only ones who watched "The Sopranos."

I read about all this last night and couldn't sleep for it, in large measure thinking of the Voltaire quotation I highlighted four or five inches from here.

Thinking about modern agency life, or modern life in general, a dour george advises you to think about how you're being treated.

(Rape rape snip snip, oh what a routine it is.)

Are you being abused? Are they cutting off your balls? If so, it's only mankind, that's Voltaire, repeating itself.

I might be too dark by a large percentage, but that doesn't mean all this shouldn't be thought about.