Cancer USA
What if cancer was more than a biological malfunction? What if it went beyond typical physical manifestations that we presently identify with? It is pretty well established that if you live long enough, your body will endure some kind of cancer. Malignancy is inherent to our species. It is just a question of when, where and how. Except if you smoke pot. (Note: The B.D. did not smoke any before having this thought or writing this entry)
What I am driving at is expanding the definition of cancer to our society. To pick an easy target, lets choose Wal*Mart. It is a business that exists within the organism of capitalism within the host of our democratic society. That’s fair to say, right? So, apply what cancer does to a host relative to what Wal*Mart does to a community. The community is, essentially, an organ or a bone making up part of the host. When the part fails, it hurts the whole. Aforementioned retailer sets up shop and proceeds to strangle off, no matter how slowly, most of the local community business which is the fiber and backbone of the locality. In their absence, hegemony breeds and stagnates. You could say it metastasizes and potentially kills of the community/organ. This skips over a lot of detail, but we are not aiming for a thesis here.
Similar can be said of this country’s political parties and/or government. Why do societies fail? I am sure Collapse covers this topic in much more thorough and detailed terms than I ever could, but what I don’t know is if it applies and extends the metaphor of cancer to the subject matter. Certainly, what would be too easy to do is to say that money is carcinogenic agent that is integral to the inception of all the possible malignancies in our society.
With that said, it is more likely that money is merely the delivery agent. Its kind of like the saying “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.” True, but lame. To cut to the chase and get Buddhist on your bloggasspheres, desire would be the culprit. But again, I bring up desire with full acknowledgment that there is some evolution and development due on that concept. It may not even be worth getting into except that work sucks today and it just feels better blue skying a bit.
Desire, for the purposes of this posting, means greed. Greed brings us to so many things such as suburban sprawl, gas guzzling cars and trucks, pork barrel politics and much more. Many things today in our American culture are easily, or at least arguably, too big for our own good. How much does one person need? How safe is safe? How good can things really get? Scientists have said of the big bang that the universe has or will, at some point unknown to us, stop expanding and start contracting. America’s expansion may be at an end and we can’t see it just like we can’t see the universe contracting.
In the natural life of a nation, good and bad things happen, but eventually they implode for one reason or another. It is this Deviant’s position that America’s implosion, which is manifest, is due in no small part to the malignancy inherent within our capitalist system. And this malignancy (Wal*Mart, pork barrel politics, the hubris of heads of state, SUVs) is latent in all of us because we are all capable of and slaves to (in one way or another) greed. (Can you tell that this Bourgeois Deviant is sick to death of working for bankers?)
Truth be told, this posting could be wildly guilty of the deliberate and obtuse application of a weak metaphor. At the end of the day, it is a matter of opinion. Now, what do you think?
UPDATE: This Deviant just realized he missed happenstance by one minute.
What I am driving at is expanding the definition of cancer to our society. To pick an easy target, lets choose Wal*Mart. It is a business that exists within the organism of capitalism within the host of our democratic society. That’s fair to say, right? So, apply what cancer does to a host relative to what Wal*Mart does to a community. The community is, essentially, an organ or a bone making up part of the host. When the part fails, it hurts the whole. Aforementioned retailer sets up shop and proceeds to strangle off, no matter how slowly, most of the local community business which is the fiber and backbone of the locality. In their absence, hegemony breeds and stagnates. You could say it metastasizes and potentially kills of the community/organ. This skips over a lot of detail, but we are not aiming for a thesis here.
Similar can be said of this country’s political parties and/or government. Why do societies fail? I am sure Collapse covers this topic in much more thorough and detailed terms than I ever could, but what I don’t know is if it applies and extends the metaphor of cancer to the subject matter. Certainly, what would be too easy to do is to say that money is carcinogenic agent that is integral to the inception of all the possible malignancies in our society.
With that said, it is more likely that money is merely the delivery agent. Its kind of like the saying “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.” True, but lame. To cut to the chase and get Buddhist on your bloggasspheres, desire would be the culprit. But again, I bring up desire with full acknowledgment that there is some evolution and development due on that concept. It may not even be worth getting into except that work sucks today and it just feels better blue skying a bit.
Desire, for the purposes of this posting, means greed. Greed brings us to so many things such as suburban sprawl, gas guzzling cars and trucks, pork barrel politics and much more. Many things today in our American culture are easily, or at least arguably, too big for our own good. How much does one person need? How safe is safe? How good can things really get? Scientists have said of the big bang that the universe has or will, at some point unknown to us, stop expanding and start contracting. America’s expansion may be at an end and we can’t see it just like we can’t see the universe contracting.
In the natural life of a nation, good and bad things happen, but eventually they implode for one reason or another. It is this Deviant’s position that America’s implosion, which is manifest, is due in no small part to the malignancy inherent within our capitalist system. And this malignancy (Wal*Mart, pork barrel politics, the hubris of heads of state, SUVs) is latent in all of us because we are all capable of and slaves to (in one way or another) greed. (Can you tell that this Bourgeois Deviant is sick to death of working for bankers?)
Truth be told, this posting could be wildly guilty of the deliberate and obtuse application of a weak metaphor. At the end of the day, it is a matter of opinion. Now, what do you think?
UPDATE: This Deviant just realized he missed happenstance by one minute.
Labels: buddhism, cancer, desire, hegemony, opinion, pot, sprawl, Wal Mart
posted by Bourgeois Deviant at
4:21 PM
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