Zero-Sum Life

It's a Zero-Sum Life, there's no two ways about it, Bub. You come in with nothing and you leave with nothing. And that's fine. Every minute is zero sum - it's here, it's gone. We sell our time, most of it, anyway. We work for someone else (whether you're punching a clock or running your own business, you're working in service of someone else), we absorb content that's riddle with advertising messages (selling our eyeballs to marketers, who are selling their time to sell our time to others who are selling their time to make something to sell to us for the money we made selling our time to someone else), and of course we sell our time to our kids, our friends, our family, our community, etc...

Sure, there's learning, selling our time essentially back to ourselves to become better and more effective at selling pieces of our lives to others. We learn about the wonderful discoveries of others who were learning things in their great endeavor of selling themselves to others, and we become more productive salesmen of our own time. And we think there may be a few of the super-wealthy who can opt out, but are they not constantly selling their time to promote benefits of their gilded-cage lifestyle? Hell, right now I'm selling my time to you - the time it takes to write this, I sell that to you - you might enjoy how great a writer I am or endure how terrible, I'm selling you this content in exchange for your attention and the time it takes you to read it, or maybe you give up and just stop here -

"Ok, so if it's all zero-sum," you ask, "what's the point." Excellent question. Is ours the task of furthering the Human Endeavor? Maybe. Sounds nice, has an egalitarian optimism to it. But what's that for? The end game is, it seems, that we as humans reach that pivotal point of Utopia. That moment where humanity is free from the chains of fate, chance, the gruel of life, pain, suffering... the stuff of being human. In such a world, the underpinnings of what we all live by just fall away - capitalism and wealth, time, health, politics and class, lifestyle, and conflict all become obsolete. Happiness becomes the final capital.

Team America - Not in the Playoffs

"That's it, man. Game over, man. Game over! What the fuck are we gonna do now? What are we gonna do?" - Private Hudson, Aliens (1986)

Something horrible has happened over the past, oh, say - thirty years. Politics in America has become The War on America. But this one isn't fought out on the front lines, this one is trench warfare. The trenches are so deep that neither side can see anything that isn't two feet in front of their collective faces.

Team Politics has become so prolific, so rampant, that the enlightened serf of America who has been classically trained in the art of team worship and rivalry, has become a split-camped, foam-mouthed, rabid sociopathic rotten curd of the really underbelly-cheese. Blindly so do they frolic forth, vitriol streaming from both sides. It's as if they've been trained, from a very young age, that the other side poses a threat to their very way of life, to rob the coffers and send do-gooders to the pokey, and those baddies would sell out America to get what they want - and what they want is the purity of unfiltered evil. But here's the rub: both sides think this.

Wade through all the baloney, all the rhetoric, peel back the patina of importance, look beyond the talking heads - try, just this once, to participate in the Actual Truth, and this one fact will become blindingly clear. What is the real a-bo-bo of truth here isn't quite a lie, but rather, an exaggeration. What has happened over these thirty-some-odd years is that what was once a simple and well-intentioned leadership vote has been fueled by every throbbing pundit-exaggeration into a gas fire and can be distilled into one simple question: Are you ready to submit to orifice-probing by your new Martian Nazi Overlords?

The Truth: If everyone is so wrapped up in the greased-back slime pitch of either party, convinced that the opposite team is trying to destroy America - blood-lusting, screaming, frantic - guess who wins? Take a moment and think about who stands to gain the most when a royalty-free, content generating behemoth not only takes over the airwaves, but takes over all the attention, AND - and this is the big one - AND pays through the nose for a huge chunk of prime airtime throughout the land?

Could it be? Could the media be stoking the flames of discontent, only to sell airtime to a couple of bozos who it has been established that nobody likes - and everyone is on the sidelines lapping it up like a bunch of grateful strays?

Mudslinging and Falsies

"Shit just finds my face." Cameron Diaz, Top Gear

It is no small coincidence that elections take place just days after Halloween - and this year's elections are particularly hairy. It's a scary time; every two years Real Monsters don people-suits and do a little of the ol' soft shoe to try to fool voters, scare the public, and flat out lie. A story on NPR's website finds that through fact-checking and research, this season's political ads ring Barely True on a whole. This means that every pearl of truth lies deep in a wheel barrow of horseshit.

Do we expect any less? I don't, but we are so jaded that we let it slide as an uncontested truth. Politicians? We know they're lying sacks, but that's what they're supposed to be - what they say and do are from two sides of the same schizoid brain. They don't even know they're lying. Survey that landscape, feel the heeby-jeebies take hold.

So put on a costume and drink heavily this weekend. For by the end of next week we'll have a new set of deviant handlers who have coddled and lied their way into top paying positions of rank, only to drool and twitch at the coming money-grab.